^ 






..t 



''-t-'^' 







OLD PLYMOUTH ROAD. 
Ninth Milestowe. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 



AN ADDRESS 



IN COMMEMORATION OF 



Ci^c €)nc i^unDrcOtlj annitcrjiatr 



INCORPORATION OF QUINCY, MASS, 



Delivered July 4, 1892. 



CHARLES J'R^,^ 4DAMS 





LIBRA 



^.%NGTON, ^ 



CAMBRIDGE Q 
JOHN WILSON AnS ^N. 

1892. S: ^ 




I 2.1^7 '6 



1 i::1 






ADDRESS. 



OOME months ago I had occasion to discuss certain details 
of the celebration we are now engaged in with a greatly 
valued friend of mine, bearing a name inscribed on many pages 
of the records of Old Braintree, and who, in his own person, is 
one of the few remaining specimens of the antique stock, — 
the town-meeting stand-bys of former Quincy. In the course 
of our discussion I referred to an address as one mode of com- 
memoration, telling him frankly that in my judgment the day 
of such addresses was over, — that vvc had, in fact, of late been 
deluged with them, especially since what may well enough be 
described as the epoch of revolutionary centennials came in. 
The not unnatural result had followed ; and, as we all know 
from our own experience, we now turn with a sense of weari- 
ness, if not, indeed, of surfeit, from that page of a daily paper 
the columns of which are headed with an announcement that yet 
one more commemoration has been observed in the custom- 
ary way. These historical orations and addresses had, as I then 
went on to argue, at one time served their purpose, and it was 
a useful purpose ; for in them is recorded much of historical 
worth which otherwise might not have been preserved : but 
this was before the days of town histories and historical socie- 
ties ; and now the oration or address had become the medium 
by means of which a quantity of rhetoric or sentiment of small 
present, and, so far as my observation went, of no future, value 
was forced on the jaded eye and ear of an inattentive public. 
Forgotten as soon as uttered, even the future antiquarian is 
not likely to disturb the dust which accumulates upon those 



6 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

yellowing pages. As I then told my friend, almost every period 
seems to have some favorite mode of expression: — the last 
century was in Massachusetts the era of sermons and pulpit 
discourses, and it industriously stored up a vast literature of 
that description, the present dreariness of which is inexpres- 
sible : ours has been the century of orations and secular ad- 
dresses, — the Ciceronian period of America; and so, during 
it, rhetoric and eloquence, much too often of the tinsel, aca- 
demic sort, have been made to serve the purpose which logic 
and theological fervor served before. And, finally, I expressed 
the belief that the student of the twentieth century would hold 
this form of expression of our time in no greater value than we 
hold the sermons and occasional discourses of the fathers. But 
we too will have seen ourselves in print ! 

As I argued thus with the friend to whom I have referred, 
he refused to accept my conclusions, replying that in his judg- 
ment it was inexpedient on occasions like the present to dis- 
pense with the time-honored feature of an address. He not 
inaptly compared it to the planting of a milestone, which 
marked for all future time some point which a community had 
reached in its endless journey. Here we pause for a moment ; 
and, resting from the march, we cast a glance backward over 
the road by which we have come, as well as forward over that 
we are yet to traverse. At such a time, he went on, we are, or 
ought to be, a world unto ourselves : why, then, trouble our 
minds about other people or about posterity, wondering whether 
other people are looking at us, or whether posterity will bear 
us in memory ? — it is enough that we have got thus far in our 
progress, and, throwing off our loads for this day, we pile up 
the stones which in the future shall serve as a memorial that 
here we rested as we passed the hundredth milepost of Quincy. 
Then he referred to other days, reminding me of milestones 
planted in bygone times by the hands of those who are dead ; 
and as he enumerated these, I had to admit force in what he 
said. First was the milestone, now more than a century and 
a half old, which we owe to the Rev. John Hancock, then 
pastor of the North Precinct Church of Braintree, — a mile- 
stone which has come down to us in the form of two sermons 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 7 

delivered by him to his people, then gathered on Sunday, 
the 26th of September, 1739 (N. S.), within the walls of the 
old meeting-house which stood hard by this spot. After the 
delivery of which discourses the ancient records say that, " be- 
ing the Lord's day, the First Church of Braintree, both males 
and females, solemnly renewed the covenant of their fathers 
immediately before the participation of the Lord's Supper." 
The century of church life was complete, and a fitting memo- 
rial of it provided, — a memorial which, though little noticed 
by the great outer world, some of us here would be sorry not 
to have. 

Another century passed away, and on the same occasion, 
on the same date in 1839, though not from the same pulpit, 
William Parsons Lunt in the stone temple, as it is called, 
which eleven years before had succeeded on the training-field 
the ancient meeting-house in which John Hancock delivered 
his centennial address, — in this stone temple, this very edifice, 
Dr. Lunt set up another of my friend's milestones, which re- 
mains to-day a valued and lasting memorial of the preacher's 
eloquence and scholarship. Few now remember him, but 
William Parsons Lunt was in his day a great pulpit orator, — 
and he was great because he was natural. The second mile- 
stone is his monument. 

Fifty years more elapsed, and only the other day, in Septem- 
ber, 1889, the Rev. Daniel Munro Wilson, now here with us, 
placed a third stone, marking the end of another half century 
of ecclesiastical life, — a memorial worthy of the others, and 
one the value and significance of which will grow with revolv- 
ing years. 

Influenced, I will freely admit, by these arguments and illus- 
trations of my friend, I find myself here to-day, and here for a 
purpose, — to help plant another milestone. "All things come 
to him who waits ; " and so, amid present indifference, my ap- 
peal is to the twentieth century, or even later: — for why may 
it not be that in the year 2042, when the city of Quincy cele- 
brates its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, — and it is just 
as certain that the city of Quincy, either by itself or as part of 
some larger municipality, will be here then as it is that not one 



8 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

of US will be here, — why may it not well be that, in 2042, when 
our very gravestones are crumbling, those then dwelling here- 
about may rest for a moment as they come to the quarter- 
millennial milestone, and in doing so may hunt up the record 
of to-day, just as we hunt up the sermons of John Hancock, 
dwelling for a moment with curiosity and even interest on 
that memorial of a remote past, — clasping hands across the 
centuries. It is not many spoken words that can hope for even 
a single listener a century and a half after they drop from the 
speaker's mouth ; yet not a day passes but some one looks with 
interest on the single ancient milestone of 1720 which still 
within Ouincy limits marks the old Plymouth road. Rude, 
rouo-h and ill-proportioned, it has cut upon it, besides the 
distance from Boston and the date, the initials J. N., — stand- 
ing, I am told, for " Capt. Lieut." Joseph Neal, as he is desig- 
nated on his gravestone in the burying-ground opposite. One 
of the twenty-one children of Henry Neal, — for in those days 
there were families patriarchal, — Joseph Neal, was a select- 
man of Braintree from 1698 to 171 5, and died in 1737, leaving 
his mark inscribed on that stone by the old Plymouth road, 
which had already stood there more than half a century when 
the minute-men tramped by in the April days which fol- 
lowed Concord fight.^ So it is to-day Joseph Neal's stone. 
In like manner, on the century ecclesiastical milestone of 
the town, the name of John Hancock is inscribed ; while the 
bi-centennial bears that of William Parsons Lunt, and the 
quarter millennial that of Daniel Munro Wilson. And now 
we plant this centennial civic milestone of to-day. 

Still, in turning over the printed memorials of the past, we 
cannot help thinking of how much greater interest and value 
they would be to us had those called upon to prepare them been 
less ambitious and abstruse, — had they only felt moved to talk 
to us instead of to their congregations, and so to place on rec- 
ord something which, though commonplace and matter-of-fact 
enough then, would be quaint and curious now. For instance, 
what a stroke of inspiration would it have been if the Rev. John 
Hancock, when in 1739 he preached those two discourses to 

1 See Appendix A, p. 41. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 9 

his people in the ancient wooden meeting-house of 1732, then 
almost new, — what a stroke of inspiration would it have been 
if, in a series of notes or in some preliminary pages, he had 
described for our benefit it and the people then gathered in it, — 
the dress they wore and the forms of worship they followed ; 
the houses in which they dwelt, the streets in which they 
walked, the vocations they pursued; — had he given us, in a 
word, a pictorial census of the Ouincy of 1739! It was all so 
very familiar to him and to his hearers that the thought doubt- 
less never entered his mind ; but now, could this town as it 
stood here a century and a half ago be for an instant recalled 
to life, it would seem as strange and unreal to us as any foreign 
land, — the very language and accent in use, though intelligible 
enough, would strike oddly on the ear; — only the bay, the 
islands in it, and the everlasting hills would be the same. As 
an illustration, take this description of the meeting-house in 
which John Hancock preached, as it was first seen by one who 
came to Ouincy a young bride nearly a century ago, but still 
more than fifty years after the father of the great signer of the 
Declaration had been followed to the graveyard opposite: — 

" There were [in Quincy at that time] only two churches, both 
ancient wooden edifices, — the Episcopal and the Congregational. 
The pews in the centre of the latter, having been made out of long, 
open seats by successive votes of the town, were of different sizes, and 
had no regularity of arrangement, and several were entered by narrow 
passages, winding between those in their neighborhood. The seats, 
being provided with hinges, were raised when the congregation stood 
during the prayer, and, at its conclusion, thrown down with a mo- 
mentum which, on her first attendance, alarmed Mrs. Quincy, who 
feared the church was falling. The deacons were ranged under the 
pulpit, and beside its door the sexton was seated ; while, from an ap- 
erture aloft in the wall, the bell-ringer looked in from the tower to 
mark the arrival of the clergyman. The voices of the choir in the 
front gallery were assisted by a discordant assemblage of stringed 
and wind instruments. In 1806, when the increased population of 
the town required a larger edifice, the meeting-house was divided 
into two parts ; the pulpit, and the pews in its vicinity, were moved 
to a convenient distance, and a new piece was inserted between the 
fragments." 



lO THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

Not impossibly we might learn something of value for to- 
day's occasion from this criticism which I have ventured on 
what has been left us by those gone before. The present, in 
its every-day surroundings, seems matter-of-fact and uninter- 
esting enough to us ; none the less, the time will assuredly 
come when this commonplace present of ours will be very 
much otherwise to those who here succeed us. The remote 
is always strange. I, if no one else, therefore, may be per- 
mitted to express a hope that to-day's address will constitute 
a small part only of our centennial memorial. That memorial, 
on the contrary, should be designed to do what the Hancock 
and Lunt memorials fail to do, — it should present us to the 
future as we are. But this rests with others; it is that por- 
tion of commemorative work which deals more especially with 
externals, physical conditions, — a matter of statistics, plans 
and portraiture ; and however well and thoroughly it may be 
done, there is still a field, and a not unimportant field, which 
it cannot cover : and that field is my province. 

As municipal bodies go in America, — weighed, that is, in 
the census scales, and classified according to the number of 
its houses and inhabitants, the aggregate of its wealth, and 
the variety and value of its industrial products, — weighed in 
these census scales, no great degree of prominence can be 
claimed for Quincy. In point of population she stands twenty- 
fourth only among the twenty-eight cities of Massachusetts ; 
while in the nation as a whole, judged by the same standard, 
she is merely one out of ninety-two cities of the fifth class, ^ 
holding the one hundred and ninety-seventh place in the length- 
ening roll of American municipalities. Neither is Quincy the 
seat of any great institution of learning or special industry, — 
unless, indeed, it may still claim pre-eminence for its granite ; 
but, none the less, Quincy has had its history, nor has that 
history been devoid of individuality or interest. Unlike many 
larger communities, the record of Quincy is by no means ex- 
hausted in the pages of the census, for through more than two 

1 Under the system of division pursued in the preparation of the Eleventh 
United States Census, cities having a population of over 15,000 and less than 
25,000 are included in the fifth class. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. II 

hundred and fifty years those dwelling in the territory now 
known by that name have had to face their problems, and 
have done so as best they could. Here in America it may 
be questioned whether a state of Chinese immobility is ever 
reached ; certainly it has never been reached in Quincy. 
Sometimes, indeed, the change and consequent re-adjust- 
ment involved in the solution of these problems may have 
been slow, — so slow that those then living and affected by 
them may not have been conscious that they were going on ; 
but all the same they were going on, and if the story of them 
when told is not found instructive as well as interesting, the 
fault, we may rest assured, is not in the subject, but in him who 
treats it. No particular interest ever, so far as the average 
man can see, attached to the English Selborne, nor was there 
anything about the place or its conditions to attract especial 
notice; but a century and more ago Gilbert White lived and 
saw and wrote at Selborne, and Selborne has since been classic 
ground. It is the study and statement of these processes of 
change and re-adjustment ever going on, now forward and 
then backward, action and reaction, conditions now out of 
balance, and then again in equilibrium, — it is the study and 
statement of this which makes history ; and all this can be 
quite as well studied on the small theatre as on the large. It 
is only a matter of size, — a question of bigger or smaller; 
and, as Gilbert White proved, here too the painter, and not 
the dimensions of the canvas, makes the picture. 

Were the story of Ouincy told by some historical Gilbert 
White, it would be transmuted to a hand-mirror, in which 
could be seen reflected to the life every important phase 
through which New England and even American development 
has passed from 1622 to the present time. Unfortunately Gil- 
bert Whites are not forthcoming in response to every civic de- 
mand, and of such as are forthcoming few indeed " inherit nor 
the pride nor ample pinion that the Theban eagle bear; " and 
so the story invariably has to be told in the conventional way. 
When thus approached, our local Quincy record divides itself 
into three distinctive periods, the study of each of which, if 
entered upon in the true spirit, I, at least, find full of interest; 



12 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

and each period had its own peculiar problems to deal with. 
These periods were, first, the germinal ; next, the stationary ; 
and last, the progressive, — and they naturally followed each 
other in the order named. The first, or germinal, period, be- 
gan in 1625, when Thomas Morton established himself at 
Mount Wollaston, planting his Maypole there two years later ; 
and it ended in 1642, when this territory was given the name 
of Braintree and organized as a civil community. The sec- 
ond, or stationary period, beginning in 1640, may be said to 
have lasted one hundred and ninety years, — coming to an 
end in 1830, about the time the ancient meeting-house of the 
Rev. John Hancock made room for the edifice in which we are 
now gathered. In 1830 began the third period, that of rapid 
progress and consequent readjustment, — the period in which 
we have lived, and that of which some of the as yet unsolved 
problems will to-day engage our attention. 

Of these three periods of town history the first, or germinal, 
is by far the most interesting, for the thread of its earliest 
story interweaves itself with great events involving the fate of 
dynasties and empires, — famous names now and again flash- 
ing across the local record ; while at another time, a little 
later on, infant Braintree, not yet known as such, was the 
centre, the very hotbed, of historical episodes which left in- 
effaceable marks on the annals of Massachusetts. But this ger- 
minal period pertains rather to Old Braintree than to Ouincy, 
to the seventeenth century rather than to that the close of 
which we commemorate. Indeed, for this occasion the Brain- 
tree germinal period is almost as prehistoric as that time 
before the ice age, when, geologists tell us, the bed-rocks 
underlying our town towered up two hundred feet higher than 
now, and were fifty miles from the seaboard.^ 

But if the Braintree germinal period is for the purposes of 
to-day thus remote, it is otherwise with both the subsequent 
periods, — that which I have called the stationary, and that of 
rapid progress ; both of which, though less dramatic than the 
first, have an interest of their own. 

While, as I have already said. New England communities 

1 See Appendix 13, p. 44. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 13 

never reach a condition of immobility such as is understood 
to be characteristic of China, and while all change, be it 
rapid or slow, in\'olves, soon or late, a process of readjust- 
ment of conditions to environment, it is undeniable that the 
process of change and the consequent readjustment went on 
slowly and at the moment imperceptibly in the town life of 
the stationary period of New England history. Referring to 
that provincial life in one of his great orations, Edmund 
Burke described it, with that inimitable happiness of phrase 
possessed by him and by Shakespeare alone among English 
writers, as the existence of a people " still, as it were, in the 
gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone ; " and this it 
exactly was while five generations followed each other slowly 
across the little stage, the atmosphere of which was at once 
theological and icy. Change was neither expected nor de- 
sired. A simple, laborious, unaggressive race, those com- 
posing it were born, lived and died ; and concerning them 
there is little more to record. During that long period the 
world, both of Europe and America, was more or less con- 
vulsed ; revolutions took place in England, in Germany and 
in France, dynasties rose and fell, the house of Brunswick 
succeeded that of Stuart, and Europe waged war after war, in 
the course of which Canada passed under English rule, and 
the American colonies became independent; but, through all 
the turmoil, the local towns of Massachusetts — Braintrce and 
Quincy among the number — pursued the even tenor of their 
way. The changes going on without, of which the noise filled 
the world, were all political changes, and the readjustments 
they necessitated were likewise merely political ; but in the 
New England towns no new social forces were at work, nor was 
the existing equilibrium, social, religious, economical or political, 
seriously disturbed. Thus in 1830 the inhabitants of Quincy 
cultivated the same fields their fathers had cultivated in 1650, 
and used in so doing much the same implements ; they navi- 
gated the same waters with similar vessels. Each generation 
in the course of an eventless, patient, laborious life accumu- 
lated something, leaving to the next generation more fields 
under cultivation, better dwellings and farm buildings, and 

3 



F4 THE CENTENNIAT, MILESTONE. 

some adflitional comforts and appliances of life ; ])ut. domcsUc 
and social usa^^es, and, indeed, all the practical machinery of 
existence, remained much the same. While the outer world 
influenced but little the village community, the village commu- 
nity in no way affected the outer world. It has a strange 
sound now, but it is none the less true that prior to 1830 — 
only sixty years ago — steam was an unknown factor iti the 
life and industry of Quincy, and what we term machinery was 
unknown. As it was in 1640, so it remained a hundred and 
ninety years after ; and within the memory of men hardly yet 
regarded as old, the horse, the ox, the wind nnd the siroam 
were the only forces auxiliary to man. In 1H26 the granite 
railway was constructed here in Quincy, and four years later 
the first railroad was incorporated in Massachusetts; but, 
incredible as it now seems, more than one hundred and sixty 
years elapsed after Braintree was incorporated as a town, be- 
fore even a baggage wagrm, adapted also to the carriage of 
persons, was run over the road between iioston and Ouincy, — 
80 trifling was the intercruirse and trriffic betvv(;(Mi the two 
places, thfjugh but seven miles aput. I'.ven then, when m 
1804 the exfjeriment of such a ( onveyance was tried, it was 
found through twenty years t(j meet every existing nerd ; and 
not until 1H2'] did the stage-coach period be^dn. I'.ul the 
wine had now brgiin to frnncnl, :iiid three years later the 
railway came: then, slowly at first, but more and more rapitlly 
later ow, the era f^f change set in ; and by degrees the ( uslrnns 
and institutions which ICnglish and i'retich revolutions, wars 
of independence anrl fonf|Uf:Mts of (Canada li.id .iffec led litlle 
if at all, steam and clectrir ity radically altered. 

With the change came the ncccs.sity of rcadjiistmeni. I In- 
body politic had to adapt its political system to I In- new 
crwirfMirnents, and the alterations to be m;ide in I lie |ioIilical 
system, if satisfactr>ry rcsullH were if) be biou;',lil .iboui, li.id 
to be juHt an far-reaching as h;id been the change in llic 
sf)cial, material and industrial (ondilions, b»i they all move 
together. It is with the prfjblefnn involved m i hene < li.ingeH, 
;itid the, coriHcrjUcnt rcadjustmenl ;ni<l ;iil,i|.l.ilion, lli.il we 
hav<: found our'iclvc'i (onfionled dniinj; tin: ( lo:.in;', ye.ii'i 



THE CEXTENNIAL MILESTONE. 1 5 

of our first centur}* of independent civic life. During its 
second century those problems will have to be solved, and 
it is to them and their solution I now propose to address 
myself. 

But first it is necessary to state what those problems are, 
or rather what that problem is ; for, when all is said and done, 
the problem is single, and as easy to state as it is difficult to 
solve. Coming, then, directly to it and using few words, the 
system — the time-honored system — of local municipal gov- 
ernment under which our fathers lived and the countr)- pros- 
pered and grew has, in the presence of the changes of the last 
fifty years, completely broken down and been in large degree 
abandoned. In Boston, first among the communities of Mas- 
sachusetts, they abandoned it seventy years ago, just as we 
here in Ouincy, following many precedents more recently 
established, abandoned it four years ago ; we abandoned it as 
others abandoned it, not because we wanted to abandon it, 
but because we had to abandon it ; and we had to abandon it 
simply because change necessitated readjustment. Thus our 
problem is not ours only; on the contrary, it is that common 
problem of municipal government under republican institu- 
tions which for many years has caused, and for more years 
yet is likely to cause, thoughtful and observant Americans to 
be perplexed in the extreme. 

Under circumstances like these there is no small advantage 
gained by looking at the situation through the eyes of another, 
especially if that other chances to be a cool, reflecting outside 
observer. Those lost and wandering in the woods cannot see 
for trees, and proximity destroys the sense of proportion. 
The last and. taken altogether, the most friendly and appre- 
ciative of all recent foreign observers of things American, — 
that one the circulation of whose work has far exceeded any 
other of the same kind, — speaking of the growth of American 
cities, refers to it as " among the most significant and least 
fortunate changes " in the character of our population, and as 
a matter of " high concern to America, . . . because it is ad- 
mittedly the weak point of the country ; " then, truthfully say- 
ing that " no political subject has been so copiously discussed 



1 6 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

of late years in America by able and experienced publicists," 
he adds these comments of his own : — 

" There is no denying that the government of cities is the one 
conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the 
National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the 
people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant com- 
pared with the extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement which 
mark the administrations of most of the great cities. For these 
evils are not confined to one or two cities. The commonest mis- 
take of Europeans who talk about America is to assume that the 
political vices of New York are found everywhere. The next most 
common is to suppose that they are found nowhere else. In New 
York they have revealed themselves on the largest scale. They are 
'gross as a mountain, monstrous, palpable.' But there is not a city 
with a population exceeding two hundred thousand where the poison 
germs have not sprung into a vigorous life ; and in some of the 
smaller ones, down to seventy thousand, it needs no microscope to 
note the results of their growth. Even in cities of the third rank 
similar phenomena may occasionally be discerned, though there, as 
some one has said, the jet black of New York or San Francisco dies 
away into a harmless gray. . . . 

" For in great cities we find an ignorant multitude, largely composed 
of recent immigrants, untrained in self-government ; we find a great 
proportion of the voters paying no direct taxes, and therefore feeling 
no interest in moderate taxation and economical administration ; 
we find able citizens absorbed in their private businesses, cultivated 
citizens unusually sensitive to the vulgarities of practical politics, 
and both sets therefore specially unwilling to sacrifice their time and 
tastes and comfort in the struggle with sordid wire-pullers and noisy 
demagogues. In great cities the forces that attack and pervert 
democratic government are exceptionally numerous, the defensive 
forces that protect it exceptionally ill-placed for resistance. Satan 
has turned his heaviest batteries on the weakest part of the 
ramparts. 

"... What Dante said of his own city may be said of the cities 
of America : they are like the sick man who cannot find rest 
upon his bed, but seeks to ease his pain by turning from side to 
side." ' 

1 Bryce, T/w Atnerican Conii?ioinvcallh, chaps. 1. — lii. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 1 7 

As we well know, the picture is not overdrawn, and we must 
reconcile ourselves as best we may to the fact that the dis- 
turbance — the incessant tossing of" the sick man who cannot 
find rest on his bed" — will continue until the readjustment is 
effected. The difficulty is radical, deep-seated, striking down 
into the vitals of our political life. One hundred years ago, 
when Quincy came into independent civic existence as a town 
of nine hundred inhabitants, there were in all America but 
twelve cities, and the largest of them had but forty thousand 
inhabitants ; there are now seventy-four cities with more 
than that number. Quincy alone, a city of the fifth class, — 
one of hundreds, — has to-day nearly half the population 
New York had when Quincy became a town. In 1792 there 
was no city government in Massachusetts. Boston, with 
twenty thousand inhabitants, was governed by its board of 
selectmen chosen in town meeting ; and it continued to be 
so governed for yet thirty years more, and until the twenty 
thousand had become forty thousand. To-day there are 
twenty-eight cities in the Commonwealth, and nearly two- 
thirds of its inhabitants live within city limits and under city 
government. Thus the old town system is disappearing ; with 
us here it has disappeared. 

Students of the laws which guide the process of what is 
known as evolution state as a fundamental principle that " the 
greater the amount of progress already made, the more rapidly 
must progress go on ; " though the average man is always, in 
an unreflecting way, inclined to assume that the course of events 
will stop where it is, and things for the future remain about 
as they now are. But in this matter the student, and not 
the average man, is right ; and moreover the swift and ever 
accelerating process now going on from natural causes in the 
matter of change from town to city government is further 
artificially stimulated by that protective system which has be- 
come such a fixed and leading feature in the economical and 
fiscal policy of the national government. Thus all things 
in this country seem to combine to draw population away 
from a state of rural and agricultural diffusion to one of 
manufacturing: and urban concentration. 



1 8 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

Not many of us living here in Quincy realize how complete 
this change has been in our own case, and how rapidly it has 
gone on of late, — how little in any respect the Quincy com- 
munity of 1892 resembles that of 1792. I have already alluded 
to that Quincy, — the wholly vanished Quincy of the earlier 
time; but, since I did so, we have been peering forward on the 
road we are yet to travel, trying to make out its direction and 
character, whether broad and straight and level, or devious, 
steep and narrow. I shall presently ask you to take another 
and longer onward look ; but, before doing so, let us, pausing 
yet at our centennial milestone, look back once more for an 
instant. There are among us those, nor are they few in 
number, who have recently joined the column, and so are 
but imperfectly informed both of the way we have traversed, 
and of what occurred as we journeyed along it. This looking 
back, moreover, is not only necessary for the purposes of my 
address, but it is the historical portion of it; and, as such, an 
essential of the place and day. 

This Quincy of ours you know, and to us it is a very com- 
monplace concern ; nor shall I weary you by describing it. 
You do not need to be told of its inhabitants, nearly twice ten 
thousand in number, with names English, Irish, Scotch, French, 
Swedish, and of many other origins, those bearing which wor- 
ship in many churches, or not at all, while they earn their 
bread in multifarious ways. It would be little better than 
waste of time were I to repeat before you the figures of the 
school census, and tell you how many scholars — with a con- 
siderable proportion of whom English is not even the mother 
tongue — are taught in the numerous districts, or try to esti- 
mate the weight of the tonnage which daily grinds over the 
fast-increasing mileage of our overburdened highways. In 
one region, the Quincy of to-day is but the retiring-room, the 
sleeping apartment, of the Boston counting-house; while in 
another it is a mining camp ; and in yet a third a manufactur- 
ino- community. There is hardly a farm left within the muni- 
cipal limits ; while, except for purposes of pleasure or at our 
lumber and coal yards, we have no more to do with the ocean 
or navigation than if the seaboard still were, as it was ten 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 19 

thousand years ago, fifty miles away.^ But why go on with the 
idle enumeration of things familiar ? On the contrary, let me 
go back at once to the Ouincy of one hundred years ago ; 
nor, nearly forty years later, in 1830, had it undergone any 
material change. 

The petition for the incorporation of the town, as spread on 
the first pages of its earliest book of records, was signed by 
one hundred and fifty persons, the bearers of fifty-nine several 
names, every one of which was English in its origin ; or else 
those bearing such few as were not originally English names 
had been so long domiciled in New England that the foreign 
names had become thoroughly Anglicized.^ The fifty-nine 
names were thus indicative of one homogeneous stock; those 
bearing them spoke the same language, followed the same 
traditions, had the same social customs, pursued much the 
same vocations, and worshipped according to one creed and 
in a common meeting-house. So completely was this last the 
case that one of the townsmen of that generation, referring to 
a certain thing as being of most unusual occurrence, declared, 
in a paper which has come down to us, that it was " as 
rare an appearance as a Roman Catholic, — that is, as rare 
as a comet or an earthquake." 

As nearly as can be ascertained, the population of the new 
town numbered nine hundred souls in all, divided into some- 
what less than two hundred families, whose accumulated 
wealth may possibly have amounted in value to a half million 
of dollars. Their property consisted almost exclusively of land 
and the buildings thereon, with their contents ; for paper secu- 
rities in our sense of the term were then unknown, except in 
the form of personal or town notes, or loans secured by bond 
and mortgage. Taxation was almost nominal ; and during the 
first ten years of Quincy town life the average annual levy for 
what are now known as municipal purposes, that is, purposes 
exclusive of the support of the church and pastor, which then 
devolved on the town, — exclusive of this, the average annual 
levy between 1792 and 1800 was but $1,000, or about $1.00 
per year to each inhabitant. It is now over two hundred 
1 See Appendix C, p. 47. 2 See Appendix D, p. 48. 



20 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

times as much, while the average amount exacted annually 
from each inhabitant has risen nearly thirteen fold since 1792, 
and more than seven fold since 1840: it was $1.00 when 
the century began, and $1.72 when the century was half 
over; it is $12.57 now that the century is closed. In 1792 
the appropriation for the support of the town schools — or 
rather the town school, for there was but one — amounted 
to $250; and in 1829 it amounted to but ;^i,563, of which 
$60 was for fuel and $5.00 for incidentals, — these latter being 
" ink and brooms." The amount expended for the educa- 
tion of each child in the public schools was then $3.00 per 
annum; it is now $16. It was the same with the highways. 
There are at this time in Quincy some fifty miles of public 
streets, much of which is subjected to a traffic in the car- 
riage of granite which no pavement known to the engineer or 
road-builder is able long to bear; and in 1890 over $40,000 
was spent in the maintenance of these streets. In 1792 the 
old original Plymouth road, — a section of the great "Coast 
Road" of 1639, — with its few arterial branches, alone existed; 
and at the town meeting of that year a vote was passed "that 
a sum of money be raised for the purpose of repairing the 
Blue Hill road," as the highway from Boston to Bristol county 
was called ; " and it was further voted that three pounds," or 
$10, "be raised for repairing the same." It was then, the 
record further tells us, voted that " a new pall be purchased by 
the selectmen ; " for the town in those days made decent pro- 
vision for the sepulture of the dead as well as for the spiritual 
welfare of the living. Nearly thirty years later, in 1820, a com- 
mittee appointed to investigate the subject reported that the 
room in which the one town school was kept was so crowded 
that the scholars, two hundred and four in number, "were ob- 
liged to wait one for the other for seats, notwithstanding the 
master gave up his desk and used every other means in his 
power to accommodate them ; " and the committee then went 
on to submit a plan for certain alterations, at an estimated cost 
of $200, by which two hundred and fifty scholars were to be 
brought together in one room and under one master, " with an 
assistant when necessary." Ten years later, in 1830, the sum 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 21 

of $600 was deemed an adequate provision for a year's main- 
tenance of the highways. 

But instead of going on with these details, I will come at 
once to what the records show was the golden period of Quincy 
town gov^ernment, more especially as so doing affords oppor- 
tunity for a tribute to one now wellnigh forgotten, but who, 
during that golden period, was the great administrator of 
Quincy town affairs. I am one of the not large and fast- 
decreasing number of Quincy people who still remember 
Thomas Greenleaf, — for he died nearly forty years ago ; and 
I remember him only as an aged man, with white hair, a 
deeply wrinkled face and anxious, troubled eyes, driving to 
and fro through the village street, from his home to the post- 
office or to church, in a queer old-fashioned vehicle drawn by 
a horse which seemed as much advanced in years as its mas- 
ter, and hardly less retired from active life. Thomas Greenleaf 
was then the shadow of his former self ; but in his day and 
generation he was a power in Quincy. 

Between 1800 and 1835 the people of the town were well to 
do, but they had a traditional horror of waste, and scrutinized 
their tax-bills closely. While the scale of town expenses was 
so limited that no item escaped notice, and the sum of five dol- 
lars spent for an unaccustomed purpose would not improbably 
lead to a town meeting discussion, anything like corruption in 
public office was of course impossible ; it would have been de- 
tected at once. Though the conditions were thus most favor- 
able to good administration of affairs, prior to 18 10 the town 
business had been done in a loose, unsystematic way. The 
annual appropriations were made by viva voce vote ; the treas- 
urer received the money which the constable collected ; and 
the selectmen drew it out and paid it over to the minister, the 
schoolmaster, and those charged with the care of the town's 
poor. No reports or estimates were made, no papers placed 
on file; everything was done on a general understanding. A 
cruder, less organized system would be difficult to imagine ; 
and little could be said in its favor, except that it was natural, 
and, like most natural things, it worked well under the circum- 
stances. As the town increased, some individual was needed 

4 



22 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

to organize such a degree of system as the new conditions de- 
manded, — there was a distinct call for a man of administrative 
capacity ; and that man appeared in Mr. Greenleaf, — the typi- 
cal, natural leader and administrator of a Massachusetts town ; 
one whose field was small, but who was none the less a states- 
man in his way, and a statesman of a school which the 
community cannot do without. For in this case the rule is 
reversed, — it is the less which includes the larger; and, where 
every minor division of a community habitually produces a 
body of selectmen certain of whom are capable of organizing 
and administering the affairs of a town, the community as a 
whole can be depended upon always through a process of 
natural selection to evolve statesmen in an emergency. It 
was so in the Revolution; — the town meeting was the nursery 
of the Continental Congress, — the selectman developed into 
the cabinet official. 

Of this class was Thomas Greenleaf. Boston born, he was 
graduated at Harvard in 1790; and coming to Quincy to live 
in 1803, he remained there until his death in 1854. He 
speedily began to take an active interest in town affairs, and 
his subsequent life showed how useful in a local way a man of 
character, fair parts, and good business capacity can always be. 
He belonged to the colonial gentry ; and, a man of property, 
he was, it almost goes without the saying, a strong Federalist. 
In 1808, and for thirteen consecutive years thereafter, he was 
chosen to represent the town in the General Court, and during 
those years he became the leading man in Ouincy ; and so 
continued until after 1835. ^s such he organized the town's 
business, and he did it admirably. The change began about 
18 12, when the cost of the town poor had grown to be a scan- 
dal. Mr. Greenleaf took the matter in hand, and caused an 
almshouse to be built. He was chairman of the building com- 
mittee. The sum of $2,000 was appropriated for the purpose, 
— for the scale then was small, — and when the building was 
completed, Mr. Greenleaf reported, with a pride which he did 
not attempt to conceal, that though no allowance had been 
made for omissions in the estimates, and much extra work had 
been done, — amounting to twenty per cent, — yet, notwith- 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 23 

Standing this, the new almshouse was finished, and every bill 
paid, with $84. 48 of the appropriation unexpended. Under his 
close business management the cost of maintaining the poor 
was then reduced by more than one half ;' and his reports on 
the subject, spread in full on the records, are as interesting 
to-day in presence of that still unsolved problem of pauperism 
as they were when written, more than seventy years ago. 

Having reduced the care of the poor to a system, Mr. Green- 
leaf turned his attention to other matters. Insensibly, but 
steadily, the method of conducting public business in all its 
branches was brought into strict order. In March the annual 
town-meeting was held, and over it Mr. Greenleaf presided as 
moderator; the full list of town officers was chosen, and the 
various articles in the warrant referred to special committees. 
The meeting then adjourned. In April another meeting was 
held, and the committees on the almshouse, the schools, the 
town lands, and the town finances presented their reports, 
which were in writing, and entered into every detail. Another 
adjournment was then had, and in May the appropriations were 
voted. Everything was thus made public and of record ; and 
everything was open to criticism and debate. As a system of 
local government, under the conditions then existing, it did not 
admit of improvement. 

It is needless to say that under the Greenleaf n]^iinc Qmncy 
prospered greatly. A debt of some $2,000 was incurred on 
account of the War of 18 12 and for building the almshouse in 
1 814, but it was speedily paid off out of the surplus which a 
better management saved from the regular annual appropria- 
tions for the care of the poor. In 18 16 the town-hall and 
schoolhouse was burned down, — for town-hall and schoolhouse 
still were one. The amount appropriated for a new building 
to serve both purposes was $2,400. Mr. Greenleaf again was 
chairman of the building committee ; and once more he in due 
time, with overflowing pride, reported the work done, all the 
bills paid, whether included in the original estimate or found 
to be necessary as building went on, with an unexpended 
balance of $362.61 remaining in the hands of the treasurer. 
Though in doing this a new town debt had been incurred, good 



24 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

financial management soon paid it off without incfease of 
taxation. What was this but the administration of a state in 
miniature ? — and, when all is said and done, how considerable, 
do you suppose, in the measurement of the infinite, is the 
difference between the successful management of the affairs of 
a town and those of an empire? 

The digression may seem long, but not only does it cut on 
our milestone a name which rightfully belongs on it, but in no 
other way could I give so clear an idea of what Massachusetts 
town-government was at its best period and in its purest form. 
Under proper conditions no better government was ever de- 
vised by human ingenuity; — I should almost be willing to go 
further, and say no other form of government was ever devised 
equally good. But town government also has its limitations ; 
and Quincy, like Boston before, in due time found them out. 

The Greenleaf regime ended nearly sixty years ago, and 
during those sixty years the differentiation of modern life has 
taken place. It is one thing to manage the affairs of a small 
village community through the machinery of town-meetings ; 
it is quite another to manage those of a place numbering a 
population of a score of thousands. In 1830 the annual appro- 
priation of Quincy for necessary town expenses was $4,500. 
It has been seen how this sum was voted by a small body of 
men, all knowing each other well, having a community of in- 
terest, and acting under a usage which had the force of law. 
Forty-five years later, in 1876, the annual appropriation was 
;^ 116,000, and the articles in the warrant had swollen from half 
a dozen in number to nearly forty. The character of the town- 
meeting also had changed. In place of the few score farmers 
or tillers of the soil, following the accustomed lead of a man 
like Thomas Greenleaf in this century, or John Quincy in the 
last, and asserting themselves only when they thought their 
traditions or equality were ignored, — in place of this small, 
easily-managed body, there met in the Quincy town-meeting 
of the later period a heterogeneous mass of men numbering 
hundreds, jealous, unacquainted, and often in part bent on 
carrying out some secret arrangement in which private interest 
over-rode all sense of public welfare. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 2$ 

In Other words, — and in this respect our experience in 
Quincy has been merely a repetition of the experience of 
those dwelling in many other places, — government through 
town-meeting must always remain a primitive form of govern- 
ment, and one adapted only to the needs of a comparatively 
simple community, homogeneous, and neither too numerous 
nor with wealth very unequally distributed. Its chief excel- 
lence lies in the fact that it is the most perfect government of 
the people by the people which has ever been devised ; and its 
simplicity is its most striking characteristic. Though admitting 
of very considerable development, and far more elastic and 
adaptable to circumstances under skilful business handling 
than would naturally have been supposed, town-meeting govern- 
ment does not, any more than other forms of government, ad- 
mit of infinite development, nor is its elasticity without limit. 
The original requirements of Quincy, like other Massachusetts 
villages, were few and comparatively simple ; but during the 
last sixty years the few requirements have multiplied, the 
simple has become complex, the homogeneous has become 
heterogeneous. Church has indeed been separated from state; 
but in place of the one function of which the town was thus 
relieved, the modern municipality has found itself compelled 
to assume endless other functions. The schools have been 
multiplied ; and so have the branches of instruction pursued 
in them, — until even the more rudimentary forms of education 
have become the province of specialists. The highways, in 
the case of Quincy, are crushed under a traffic which reduces 
the firmest known pavement to powder. The care of the 
sick, the poor and the insane has been magnified into a 
science and reduced to a system. These, the ancient and 
traditional functions of the town, have all, through the nat- 
ural process of development, passed, in the larger centres of 
population, beyond the handling capacity of the ordinary offi- 
cial, and of necessity devolved upon a class of men specially 
trained to deal with them. Meanwhile, other and new needs 
have made themselves felt. The public peace has to be pro- 
vided for ; scientific provision must be made against fire ; 
streets need to be lighted, questions of public health are to 



26 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

be considered, the introduction of water necessitates drainage, 
the old burying-ground develops into the modern cemetery, 
the public school differentiates and is supplemented by the 
public library, and the training-field and ancient common, 
having passed away, are replaced by the park and the public 
garden. The performance of the duties necessarily pertaining 
to all these things, calling as they do for almost infinite special 
knowledge and a complicated financial machinery, was imposed 
little by little on the old town governments. It was as if an 
old-fashioned country cart, well designed, honestly made of ex- 
cellent material, altogether good in its day and for what was 
then needed of it, was by degrees called upon to do the work of 
a modern railroad train. As a matter of course the cart must 
break down. So government through town-meeting broke 
down in Quincy in 1888, just as nearly seventy years before 
it broke down in Boston. 

Thus the problem presented itself to us, and its solution is 
not a matter of choice or of pleasure, but of stern necessity : 
nor do I think it would be stating the case in language of 
undue strength to say that this problem of municipal govern- 
ment is the present skeleton in the closet of the American 
political household. Nevertheless, in the situation, however 
uncomfortable or disturbing it may be, there is one feature of 
great encouragement. Our problem may be difficult, and its 
solution yet remote; and few Americans who have thought 
at all upon the subject will deny that it is difficult, or that no 
great degree of progress towards a solution has yet been 
made : but at least in our case the way to a solution is open 
and obvious, — no throttle-valve chokes it. For in this respect 
the body politic bears a close resemblance to material things 
in the domain of physics ; and men of science say that if an 
amount of water enough to fill a tea-pot only, were confined 
in a small space, with no outlet of escape, and were there sub- 
jected to a sufficient degree of heat, the weight of the universe 
would not suffice to hold it in. It would find or make a 
vent ; and the commotion caused by it in so doing would be 
in exact proportion to the resistance it was forced to overcome. 
On this point, history is full of object-lessons, even though 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 2/ 

mankind is slow to see and understand them. The wars of 
the rehgious Reformation were such an object-lesson. The 
most absolute and far-reaching system of domination which 
the ingenuity of man, working on custom, superstition and 
fear, has yet devised, sought in the sixteenth century to hold 
freedom of thought in strict restraint. The new force had 
long lain inert, or expanded but slowly; then by degrees its 
presence began to be felt. Thereupon the repressive power 
in turn exerted itself, with no thought of a vent, until at 
last, through the lives of four wretched generations, it was 
as if an earthquake were shaking the everlasting hills, and 
toppling down every structure raised by man. It was the 
same in the French Revolution of the last century ; it is 
the same in Russia to-day. In other words, agitation, rest- 
lessness, disorder and the demand for change are in the 
body politic merely outward indications of some process of 
internal readjustment at the time going on, as a result of 
which the existing order of things accommodates itself to 
new conditions; and the readjustment is sudden or gradual, 
easy or violent, according to the nature of the new force 
at work, and the repressive influence against which it has 
to assert itself. Nature has a way of working peculiar to 
itself : it is not apt to be in a hurry, but it is sure ; and in its 
processes it pays no attention to the convenience of either 
individuals or communities. Consequently those internal com- 
motions, which in fact are but the indications of a healthy and 
developing community, always have made miserable, and ever 
will make miserable, the lives of the well-to-do, the comfortable 
and the conservative. They are doing so now with us here, as 
well as with others elsewhere. 

In our case, too, the new forces at work are unquestionably 
active and far-reaching, — not impossibly they may be subver- 
sive ; but at least they find a ready vent, and hence it fol- 
lows that, though there may be — and, indeed, unquestionably 
has been — a temporary deterioration, no necessity exists 
for violent action, since there is no desire for and no at- 
tempt at forcible repression. Herein much is gained. Each 
thought, each need, each craving or new impulse, intellectual 



28 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

or material, is left to develop in its own way, with the convic- 
tion on the part of all that trial and discussion are the only 
tests from which there is no appeal. The twentieth century 
has thus much advanced over the fifteenth; and America to- 
day occupies a better position than Russia or England, as they 
stand there holding their nihilistic and Irish wolves by the 
ears. Whether we personally want it or not, new light has got 
to come : but there are various kinds of light ; and it makes all 
the difference in the world whether the new light breaks as a 
quiet and gradual dawn, no matter how obscured and stormy 
in aspect, or whether it comes from the lurid glare of a 
rumbling volcano. 

It was not until the century now ended was drawing near 
its close that we here in Quincy fully realized that the change 
through which others had passed was immediately impending 
over us. For some years, as we watched the rapid growth of 
the town and the development of its functions of government, 
an uneasy feeling had, it is true, crept abroad that things could 
not forever go on in what we felt to be the good old way. We 
were vaguely conscious, in spite of ourselves, of the presence 
of that skeleton in the closet. But never had government 
through town-meeting worked better or brought about more 
satisfactory results, material and financial, than since 1870; and 
we, not unwisely, I think, deferred the impending issue until, 
in 1888, it was forced upon us by the unmistakable progress 
of events. Then the problem, of which we had heard so much 
elsewhere, confronted us ; and, girding ourselves for our work, 
we undertook to try our hand at a solution. We are, of course, 
not yet far enough advanced in the path of practical results 
to speak with any confidence of the outcome of our effort, but 
the effort was at least an honest, an intelligent and a credi- 
table one; as such, moreover, it has attracted a certain degree 
of interest from without. Of that effort, its significance, its 
merits and its shortcomings, I now propose to say something. 
Having looked back over the road by which we reached the 
spot where we are, and on which our centennial milestone will 
stand, it is time once more to peer forward over the beginning 
of the next stage in our journey. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 29 

An experience, now no longer short and still fast increasing, 
seems to indicate that one cause of the trouble experienced in 
our city governments is that they have from the beginning 
been organized on a defective model, — that they followed an 
analogy which was not applicable, — the model of the consti- 
tutions of the State and of the United States. The municipal 
government was assumed to be analogous to the political gov- 
ernment. In fact it was and is nothing of the sort: the state 
is a political entity ; the municipality, a mere business organ- 
ization. Accordingly, it is no part of the proper function of 
those handling municipal affairs to consider philosophical 
principles of state-craft. They are, on the contrary, persons 
selected by the constituencies to do the work intrusted to 
them, because the constituent masses have grown so large that 
they can no longer meet in one body to do that work them- 
selves. The function of the municipal officer is, therefore, to 
administer the affairs of a local community in an intelligent 
and business-like way. Nevertheless, in Massachusetts the 
municipal governments have always been traditionally framed 
with the cumbrous machinery of the larger political bodies. 
They have, as matter of course, had their boards of aldermen, 
representing the senate, and their common councils, represent- 
ing the more popular branch of the Legislature, instead of the 
simple executive and board of directors of innumerable other 
business organizations. Indeed, it seems almost to have been 
assumed as a maxim by the framers of the city charters that 
municipal machinery would work more efficiently in proportion 
to its clumsiness and intricacy. Again, the functions of the 
several departments of the ordinary city government have, in 
the course of time, become hopelessly confused. Responsi- 
bility has ceased to exist; for the legislative has by degrees 
encroached on the executive until, in the greater number of 
cities, the mayor is reduced to a mere cipher, while certain 
irresponsible combinations in the legislative chambers and 
city halls, generally known as " rings," really control the ad- 
ministration of affairs. Almost of necessity, the executive 
functions have more and more fallen into the hands of com- 
missions and boards, as the special requirements for the suc- 

5 



30 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

cessful management of streets, sewers, lighting, police, etc., 
grow in importance. These boards, if not irresponsible, are 
as a rule and under existing city organizations not responsible 
to the chief executive. 

Public attention had for years been forcibly called to these 
gathering difficulties by the occurrence of scandals of ever- 
increasing notoriety, more and more discussed, which those 
who drew up our Quincy charter bore freshly in mind. Ac- 
cordingly, that charter, framed in consultation with individ- 
uals both within and without the State who had made a special 
study of the subject, was based on correct political theories in 
one respect at least, — in so far as was practicable, it was not 
a creation, but an outgrowth. In this matter, the principle at 
the base of all successful constitutional government was care- 
fully regarded, — the fundamental principle that "everything 
which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must 
have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every 
institution has grown, so much the more enduring it is likely 
to prove." Changing, therefore, in the least degree possible, 
the system to which the community had long been accustomed, 
those who framed our Quincy charter proposed simply to do 
away with the old board of selectmen as an executive body, 
and with the town-meeting as a legislative body, and to substi- 
tute for them respectively a reponsible single executive, and a 
council much in the nature of a board of corporation directors. 
The framers of the charter in distributing the powers and 
functions of the proposed government followed, and followed 
correctly, the maxim that " Deliberation is the work of many. 
Execution is the work of one;" and while to the council of 
Quincy under its charter all proper deliberative and directive 
liberty was allotted, the Mayor of Quincy was avowedly in- 
tended to be clothed with a larger and more arbitrary power 
within his department than had ever in the United States been 
confided to the executive head of any organization classed as 
political.^ 

Such was and is the Quincy charter, — our attempt at a solu- 
tion of the great problem now vexing the nation. It was a new 

1 See Appendix E, p. 49. 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 3 I 

departure, — a departure carefully prepared, in full sympathy 
with the current political theories of the day ; and then under- 
standingly entered upon. Whether it will prove a successful 
departure, — a veritable and valuable contribution to political 
science, — remains to be seen; but whether in the result it 
does or does not so prove, it was and is, as I have said, none 
the less an honest, an intelligent and a well-considered attempt 
at the solution of the problem. 

And now, having said this much, let us look at the thing from 
another point of view ; for we may rest assured that, before any 
final result is reached, — at least if that result is to be of a satis- 
factory and not of a chaotic character, — this thing has got to 
be studied as well as looked at from every conceivable point of 
view. From another point of view may it not be that in the 
Quincy charter the fatal mistake was made of endeavoring to 
devise a governmental machinery which should do the work the 
citizen only can do with success? Of late the effort has un- 
questionably been, through some ingenious and careful readjust- 
ment of the parts of government and their relations to the 
community and each other, to invent a mere machine, which, 
once set in motion, will work of itself, — a kind of nickel-in-the- 
slot political arrangement, under which the citizen will be saved 
the trouble of doing anything, except periodically dropping an 
improved ballot into a patented ballot-box. 

More than a century and a half ago an English poet, a 
good deal more read formerly than now, epigrammatically 
exclaimed — 

" For forms of government let fools contest : 
That which is best administered is best." 

While this certainly is not now, and never was, wholly true, 
yet there is truth in it, — a degree of truth of which the charter 
theorists need to be reminded now that they are so plainly tend- 
ing to the opposite theory, that, in municipal governments at 
any rate, everything is in the form, the proper distribution 
of functions and concentration of responsibility — that, in 
short, if we are only patient and ingenious enough in device, a 
charter can in time be produced which, once set in motion, will 



32 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

grind out a correct and satisfactory administration of municipal 
affairs. May it not be that, after all, the Ouincy charter was to 
some extent an attempt of this sort, — an attempt to secure 
through mechanical means that which a disinterested and 
widely diffused public spirit and co-operative action only ever 
have brought about yet, or probably ever will bring about 
hereafter ? 

If this is so, it needs no prophet's eye to foresee that our 
Quincy charter is, as the solution of a difficult problem, not des- 
tined to prove a success. When Mr. Bryce, in the extracts from 
his work already quoted, said that, as respects American muni- 
cipal affairs, " we find able citizens absorbed in their private 
business, cultivated citizens unusually sensitive to the vulgari- 
ties of practical politics, and both sets therefore specially un- 
willing to sacrifice their time and tastes and comforts in the 
struggle" of civic administration, — when Mr. Bryce wrote 
this, he touched with the point of his pen the true seat of 
trouble. More than that, he indicated the only possible remedy 
for it. 

It is good to frame charters and constitutions ; it is well to 
devise ingenious political expedients ; it is refreshing to ob- 
serve the working of nicely balanced paper adjustments : — but, 
by themselves and of themselves, it is most improbable that in 
the present or any other respect these will ever work out the 
political salvation of a community which depends upon them. 
The Quincy charter, I will also add, however excellent it may 
be in theory, will in the coming years not work out the muni- 
cipal salvation of Quincy. Of that much at least we can even 
now feel assured. Something else is necessary; and that some- 
thing is men, — and, moreover, the very best men this or any 
other town or city now can or ever will supply. The solution, 
and the only solution, of the problem which torments us may 
be as easy to point out as it is difficult to secure. In looking 
for it, also, it may not be necessary to go very far afield. 

I venture to suggest, also, that in the matter of municipal rule 
and administration we might to-day derive useful hints from the 
experience in another field of France and Italy, and yet more of 
Germany. Those nations have their skeletons in the closet, — 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 33 

their problems which must be solved, — as we have ours. Ade- 
quate security against internal disorder or foreign aggression is 
their problem. Their solution of it is compulsory military ser- 
vice. Our problem is good municipal government. INIight not 
its solution be found in a species of compulsory municipal ser- 
vice .-* The suggestion of such a thing may at first seem futile 
and almost foolish ; yet, perhaps, the more it is considered, the 
less idle will it appear. In republican America, no less than de- 
spotic Russia, the community has, so far as the individual citizen 
is concerned, — no matter who that citizen may be, or what his 
vocation, or what his estate, — the community has over him a 
certain right of eminent domain ; and a right which within rea- 
sonable limits it should exercise. To say this is merely to 
assert, what no one will deny, that every citizen is towards the 
government which protects him under obligations of duty a 
quittance for which is not included in the receipt of the ta.x- 
collector. If then the public exigency demands, and the de- 
mand can in no other way be met, just as the German govern- 
ment puts its hand on every German, — high-born or low-born, 
rich or poor, — and puts him for a term of years into the ranks 
of its army, exacting from him this forced service on public ac- 
count, — so, under our institutions and in the spirit of them, you 
here in Quincy, and by the same principle those there in Bos- 
ton and in New York and in San Francisco, have a right to 
lay hands on any citizen of your or their municipality, be he 
rich or poor, prominent or obscure, educated or ignorant, and 
exact of him a term of municipal service, if you see fit so to 
do; and moreover, just as in Germany a physical disability or 
papers of discharge alone give exemption from military duty, 
so here, if a proper system prevailed, only a similar disability 
or a reasonable term of duty performed, ought to secure ex- 
emption from municipal service. Not only under a republican 
system of government is this, I repeat, the right of the commu- 
nity, but more than that, it is its duty to exercise the right, and 
to enforce its exercise by all necessary means. 

The enunciation of such a doctrine of public right and pri- 
vate duty will, I know, sound strange now, and by most be 
regarded as theoretic. I greatly fear, also, that as a practical 



34 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

remedy it is out of the question, being opposed to that ten- 
dency or drift of public opinion and unwritten law of usage 
than which nothing is more difficult to reverse or overcome. 
If such is the case, — if municipal service cannot be put on 
the same plane as jury duty, — it remains only to accept the 
situation, and to go on treating that service in the future as 
we have treated it in the more recent past, as a voluntary con- 
tribution to be made by those of more public spirit, and with- 
held by those of less. But if such is indeed the case, let no 
one hug himself in the pleasing delusion that the results of 
American municipal government in the future will be any 
more satisfactory than they have been heretofore. Most as- 
suredly they will not, for it will then be evident that the root 
of the trouble is in the decay of public spirit ; and neither 
charters nor systems of checks and balances, no matter how 
intricate or how cunningly devised, ever were or ever will be 
an adequate substitute for public spirit. On the contrary, 
those devices become then a delusion and a snare. 

Such a theory of public right and private duty may to some 
also sound Utopian rather than merely theoretic. To such, 
if such there be, I will merely say : It was not always so ! — 
and in proof thereof, I with all confidence appeal to the record. 
Listen, and you will learn, very possibly to your surprise, that 
what you now dismiss as Utopian, — that very compulsory 
municipal service, irrespective of every social distinction, which 
I have suggested, not only formerly prevailed here in Quincy, 
but was enforced by a money penalty as well as by public 
opinion. And first, I call as a witness one who, it will be 
remembered, before being President of the United States, 
served two successive years as a selectman of Braintree. 
John Adams graduated at Harvard College in 1755, and six 
years later, in 1761, was a young lawyer just beginning prac- 
tice in his native town. Here is his experience, recounted by 
himself, of compulsory municipal service as then practised : 

*' In March [of that year], when I had no suspicion, I heard my 
name pronounced [at town-meeting] in a nomination of surveyors 
of highways. I was very wroth, because I knew no better, but said 
nothing. My friend Dr. Savil came to me and told me that he had 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 35 

nominated me to prevent me from being nominated as a constable. 
' For,' said the doctor, ' they make it a rule to compel every man to 
serve either as constable or surveyor, or to pay a fine.' I said they 
might as well have chosen any boy in school, for I knew nothing of 
the business ; but since they had chosen me at a venture, I would 
accept it in the same manner, and find out my duty as I could." 

Now for other cases of the enforcement of this rule of com- 
pulsory municipal service. Your ancient records are full of 
them, nor were any exemptions allowed. For instance, in 
1734 Josiah Quincy, then a young man of twenty-five, was 
elected constable, and the town constable in those days col- 
lected the town taxes, — a duty even more odious then than 
now, for to it a financial liability for the entire levy attached 
by law : to this office of constable the Josiah Quincy of that 
day was chosen in the Braintree town-meeting of 1734; and 
the record goes on, " Mr. Josiah Quincy refused to serve, and 
paid his fine down, being five pounds." So John Borland, 
belonging to one of the few wealthy families in the town, a 
member of the Church of England society, and subsequently 
a Tory, was chosen constable in 1756, though then excused 
from serving ; but in 1757 he was chosen again, and appears 
to have served. In 1774 General Joseph Palmer, being then 
fifty-eight, a man of fortune and a deacon, was duly chosen 
constable at the annual INIarch meeting, over which he was at 
the time presiding as moderator; but he " refused serving, as 
incompatible with his church office." In 1728, Moses Belcher 
was chosen; and he declaring non-acceptance, William Fields 
was next chosen ; Fields also declaring his non-acceptance, 
"John Adams, being by a majority of votes chosen, he de- 
clared his acceptance." In 1735 no less than twenty-five 
pounds were paid in as fines for non-acceptance ; and those 
fines were looked upon as so considerable a source of revenue 
that in 1730 it had been voted that the money accruing on this 
account should be for the benefit, not of the town as a whole, 
but of the particular precincts in which the individuals who 
paid it might live. Col. John Ouincy's only son, Norton, 
graduated in 1756, and two years later, at the town-meeting 
of September 11, he was chosen constable. Another meeting 



36 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

was held a week afterwards. Colonel Quincy was then a man 
of nearly seventy, and for almost fifty years he had been the 
most prominent personage in the town. He was looked up to 
with that respect which, in the popular mind, always accom- 
panies advancing years associated with high personal charac- 
ter and the long holding of public office. The old man seems 
to have thought the choice of his son as town constable an act 
derogatory to himself; so he went into the second meeting, 
and, as the record says, "desired his son might be excused 
from serving constable." Among those to whom this request 
was addressed there could not have been many who remem- 
bered a time when the man who made it had not, as a matter 
of course, presided at town-meetings. They were not wanting 
in deference to years and standing ; and if they would defer to 
any one, they would surely defer to him after whom the North 
Precinct as an independent town was subsequently named. 
But, clearly, they thought that Colonel Quincy was now de- 
manding for himself and his an exemption from public service 
which amounted to little less than a denial of equality. Such 
an assumption of superiority was inconsistent with the spirit 
of town government. And so, the record proceeds, "after 
reasons offered," the request to be excused was "passed in 
the negative," and the town treasurer was directed " to call on 
said Norton Quincy for his fine." Apparently the old man 
felt this slight, as he regarded it, deeply ; for his name does 
not appear again in the town records, though it was nine 
years yet before he died. But young Norton Quincy accepted 
the rebuke in the true spirit. He paid his fine, and the next 
year, when the town again chose him constable, he quietly 
accepted the office and performed its duties. Later he was, 
chosen selectman, serving as such for many years during the 
revolutionary period. 

So stands the record on the point that in Quincy here there 
is nothing novel in the idea of compulsory municipal service, 
or in its practical enforcement. In former days a man could 
not be called upon to serve forever as town-constable, nor 
could he properly be called upon to serve perpetually now as 
a mayor or as member of your city council ; but he was then 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 37 

compelled to serve his reasonable term of municipal duty in 
the positions to which his fellow-townsmen called him, and 
now he should be compelled to do the same. Nor wealth nor 
indolence nor private occupation sufficed to secure exemp- 
tion then ; nor should they suffice to secure it now. 

I have also said that the American municipality is entitled 
to the service of its best men. But who are your " best men " ? 
— for, in politics, this phrase sometimes excites a sneer, as 
though in that field the talking of " best men " seemed to con- 
tain an implied and undemocratic assertion that for civic 
purposes all men are not equal. By " best men," therefore, 
are meant those who in the ordinary walks of life — on the 
street, in the court-room, the sick-chamber and the market- 
place — are recognized as most successful in their callings. 
If you are going to organize a bank or a manufacturing or a 
railroad company, you do not select from among its stock- 
holders a list of directors largely composed of those who have 
notoriously failed in whatever else they have undertaken, or 
who are otherwise discredited. You carefully select, on the 
contrary, men known to have been shrewdest and most suc- 
cessful in the management of their own affairs, and who stand 
highest in the estimate of the stockholders. Has the same 
practice been followed as a rule in the make-up of the boards 
of aldermen and common councils of our cities .-* Yet in what 
way, so far as good business management is concerned, does a 
public corporation differ from a private corporation ? ^ By the 
" best men " of a municipality, therefore, is meant those who 
are recognized and looked to as best and most successful in 
the ordinary walks of life: and it is to a reasonable share ot 
the services of these that, I insist, every municipality is entitled 
as of right ; and, moreover, that its claim should he enforced, 
where public opinion does not suffice, by such other means, 
whether of obloquy or pecuniary loss, as might be found 
necessary to bring about the desired result. 

Herein, I submit, might be found one factor, and a most im- 
portant factor, in the solution of our problem. But the sug- 
gestion of it will be met with the objection that, through the 

1 See Appendix F, p. 58. 
6 



38 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

working of the political machinery now in use, and to which 
as a community we are thoroughly accustomed, the best men 
are not selected for office. The machine, indeed, is not worked 
to that end. Far from it ; the professionals who make a busi- 
ness of manipulating the caucus are to the modern citizen, 
honestly minded but engrossed in his private affairs, very 
much what armed mercenaries were to the town mob in old 
feudal days, — nine times out of ten they are absolute masters 
of the situation. They nominate whom they please ; and, in 
municipal office, they have no use whatever for the commu- 
nity's " best men." 

There is force, too, and a great deal of force, in this practical 
view of the subject. It is true — and for us very sadly true 
— that the whole underlying political machinery now in com- 
mon use in American cities (and in Quincy, it may fairly be 
presumed, like the rest) is admirably adapted — as admira- 
bly adapted as if it were so designed — to put control securely 
in the hands of the professionals. The caucus system supple- 
ments the ward system. To be in public life in America, — 
whether in the National Congress or the city government, — a 
man must be a member of the political majority in the locality 
in which he chances to live. A political system better adapted 
to throwing control into the hands of those who will use it for 
ulterior and selfish ends, and for keeping the " best men " out 
of the field of public usefulness, could not be devised : and so 
it is against this part of the existing political machinery, I 
submit, that the charter-makers and reformers should now be 
directing their efforts, rather than in the direction of more 
ingenious contrivances for the division of functions and the 
concentration of responsibility. The difficulty is in the basis 
of representation. We reach our results to-day by the process 
of counting noses, />ro and con, within the pales of certain geo- 
graphical ring-fences known as district and ward lines ! 

The puzzle, therefore, the charter-reformer has to work out, 
if he is going to get down to the root of the matter, is some 
practical system which shall secure the utmost political free 
play to the individual citizen, and the representation of minor- 
ities in municipal affairs ; having done this, — having thus set 



THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 39 

individuals free and made minorities potent, — it will be for 
those composing the minorities to put their hands, as of old, 
on the shoulders of the " best men," and exact of them com- 
pulsory municipal service, those civic tours of public duty. 

On this problem the past throws no light. You may search 
with a conveyancer's care the pages of the Braintree records, 
or your own record-books of Quincy, but you will find nothing 
in them to aid you. The environments are all new; the 
adjustment to those environments must be equally new : but 
you will be uncomfortable all the same, — you will toss about 
like Dante's " sick man who cannot find rest upon his bed," 
— until that adjustment is effected, and correctly effected. 
It may, unquestionably it does, seem strange that in a matter 
of such moment the precedents to guide us should be so 
few, — that no finger-posts exist along the road we must 
travel. Indeed, were it not plainly so, it would be thought in- 
credible that, after nearly three centuries of active experience, 
the English-speaking race should in such a matter as local 
municipal government cling to a system which leaves it to arbi- 
trary geographical lines to supply the basis of representation, 
instead of seeking it in a common purpose existing among 
bodies of citizens. It is not easy to conceive of anything 
more illogical and crude, or, it may be added, more oppressive. 
But the absence of precedent in no way affects the situation. 
The situation is bad : nor will the trouble be settled until it is 
settled right. We are now represented by men because they 
live in the next street to us, not because they and we, think- 
ing alike on municipal matters, want to act together. It would 
surely require no great degree of ingenuity to devise a local 
municipal system under which it would be practicable for 
a scattered constituency — no longer imprisoned within ward 
lines so that those composing it may the more conveniently 
be throttled by ward politicians — so to concentrate itself as to 
escape complete suppression. It would not be profitable for 
me to discuss this matter further, for nothing which could be 
uttered here and now will perceptibly affect results. These 
things work themselves out by a law of their own ; and being 
impatient or scolding at the slow course of events is of no 



40 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

earthly use. If there is anything good or practicable in what 
has here been suggested, it will come under the pressure of 
necessity, and all in good time. Assured of this, we can 
afford to withdraw our gaze from the lengthening, onward 
road before us, with confident faith that just as the eighteenth 
century saw with us a system of compulsory municipal service 
in accepted and active operation, so the twentieth century will 
devise for us — if such a thing is really worth devising — some 
practical method of minority municipal representation which 
shall restore that system in a shape adapted to existing condi- 
tions, by utilizing to the utmost those saving forces of individ- 
uality in the citizen which are now ignorantly wasted, where 
not systematically suppressed. 

Not much remains to be said. Such as it is, the milestone 
is planted, and in a few hours more those composing our 
Quincy column of to-day — men and v^^omen, young and old, 
coming together from hall and street and park — will take up 
their burdens and again resume the line of march. The ban- 
ners may be rolled up and the mottoes put away ; for an 
hundred years must pass before those who are to succeed us 
will stop again to rest for a time and look back over a like vista. 
It is not profitable to attempt to divine the course of future 
events, for the unexpected is apt to occur: but, as our Quincy 
column winds its slow length along the dusty road or through 
the pastures new, it may at least be given us to hope that 
the Providence which watched over the fathers will not hide 
its countenance from the children. 

" Lead, Kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom, 
Lead Thou us on ; 
The night is dark, and we are far from home, 
Lead Thou us on. 



" So long Thy power hath blessed us, sure it still 
Will lead us on. 
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 
The night is gone." 




OLD TLVMOUTH ROAD. 
TwELiTH Milestone. 



APPENDIX. 



A. 

THE lack of appreciation of the ever-growing historical interest 
which attaches to monuments and local nomenclature has 
already led to the destruction of much which lends individuality to 
Quincy, as to other ancient towns. It is not easy to say whether 
the utilitarian stone-mason and surveyor of highways, or the pro- 
gressive land-speculator, has, in this respect, the heavier load of 
responsibility to carry. Good reasons can be urged against the 
preservation of ancient buildings, except in very exceptional cases. 
In course of time they become unfit for modern use, and, indeed, 
on sanitary grounds, for human habitation; while altogether too 
frequently they stand in the way of changes and needed improve- 
ments : but these arguments do not apply to old-time memorials and 
monuments, or to traditional nomenclature. These are apt to be 
interesting ; and they are never in the way. 

Take for instance the provincial milestones on the road from 
Boston to Plymouth. Chief-Justice Paul Dudley, early in the last 
century, placed a line of these through Roxbury to the Dorchester 
line, marking them with his initials, "P. D." Another line, mark- 
ing " The lower way " from Stoughton's Mill, or Milton Lower Falls, 
to Boston, was planted by Governor Belcher about 1734 {History of 
Milton, pp. 1 1 2-1 1 3). The seventh and eighth stones, bearing respec- 
tively the dates 1722 and 1723, but without initials, are still standing 
on the west and south roadside in Milton. The ninth, the first of 
the series in Quincy, is referred to in the text, and is reproduced in 
the frontispiece to this Address. At least one attempt has been 
made to remove and " utilize " this stone for some such purpose as 
repairing a wall or covering a drain ; but the emphatic objection of 
members of the Newcomb family, whose house stood opposite to it. 



42 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

prevented, in this case, an act of stupid and ignorant desecration. 
The tenth stone — an historical landmark in Old Braintree and 
Quincy — stood in its proper place by the roadside in the centre 
of the town, until one day, some twenty years ago, a stone-mason, 
building one of those fortifications known as ornamental stone walls 
in front of the house of the late Lemuel Brackett, seized upon it, 
tore it up and cut it to pieces, and inserted a portion of it in the 
wretched wall he was constructing. The portion thus preserved bears 
the initial letter, " B," and the distance figures (lo) from Boston; 
the rest of the stone is gone. The eleventh milestone stood close to 
the so-called Adams houses at the foot of Penn's Hill. Less fortu- 
nate than the tenth, this milestone wholly disappeared years ago, 
and no trace of it remains. It was probably taken possession of 
by the masons engaged in building the Samuel Curtis house in 1830 
(Quincy Patriot, Oct. 26, 1889) ; and they, with no idea whatever 
of the act of desecration they were committing, not improbably used 
it in common with the stones of the old boundary wall, near the 
street end of which it is said to have stood, as foundation material. 
Indeed, the tradition is that all this stone was " utilized " for the 
underpinning of the barn built close behind the house, and still 
standing. If such is the case, it is within the bounds of possibility 
that the old eleventh milestone may yet be recovered, and restored to 
the place where it stood for more than a century. The twelfth 
milestone still stands on the rising ground beyond the southern 
slope of Penn's Hill, on the easterly side of the road. It bears, 
besides the indications of distance and date (1727), two sets of 
initials, I. M. and I. H. I have not ascertained of whom they are 
commemorative. Some years ago a highly utilitarian surveyor of 
highways seized on this stone as a handy cover for a drain or 
culvert he was engaged in constructing. Fortunately this act of 
vandalism came to the knowledge of Samuel A. Bates, the veteran 
town clerk and antiquarian of Braintree, who bestirred himself in 
time, and was lucky enough to induce the selectmen to interfere 
and preserve the memorial. 

It has been the same with the names of streets and localities. 
The section of the ancient historical coast road of Massachusetts 
Bay, provided for by action of the General Court in 1639, the 
route of which through Old Braintree was fixed finally in 1648, — 
this most interesting of all New England roads, connecting, as it 
did, Boston with Plymouth when both were the capitals of separate 
colonies, — this Coast Road, instead of being known as such, or. 



APPENDIX. 43 

at least, if it must be modernized, as "The Plymouth Road," or even 
as "Plymouth Street," — this ancient thoroughfare has, in Quincy, 
been divided up under the meaningless names of Adams, Hancock, 
School and Franklin streets ! The eager desire people, especially 
the residents in suburban towns and cities, have for living in a 
" Street " or on an " Avenue " is marked, and productive, tradition- 
ally, of disastrous results. Though Park Lane in London is one of 
the most fashionable quarters of the metropolis of the British Empire, 
it is currently supposed that the dweller in the outskirts of what is 
known as a " live American town " cannot sleep quietly in bed if he, 
or more usually she, lives in a house in a "Road" or a "Lane." 
Accordingly, in Quincy, not only has the Old Plymouth Road been 
dismembered and brought to life again in the way just described, 
but, among other and similar cases, " Col. Quincy's Gate " has been 
re-baptized as Bridge Street, and "The President's Lane," so called 
because John Adams opened it to reach his cow-pasture on Stony- 
Field Hill, has been converted — Heaven only knows why — into 
Goffe, or Goflfee, Street. Finally, the noble tree-lined private avenue 
laid out from the Neponset turnpike to his dwelling by the third 
Josiah Quincy, nearly a century ago, instead of being known for 
all time as " President Quincy's Avenue," has lately turned up as 
commonplace Elm Avenue. 

But the worst act of vandalism of this sort is the most recent. In 
the northern portion of Quincy, near Squantum, there was a region 
known from time immemorial as the " Farms District." It was a 
broad plain some distance south of the Neponset, and lying between 
the bay front and the swamps through which the line of the Old 
Colony railroad was run. In all Massachusetts there was no site 
of greater historical interest than this, for from it the Commonwealth 
may, in some sense, be said to have derived its name. Writing in 
1633, William Woods said of it: "This place is called Massachu- 
setts Fields, where the greatest Sagamore in the country lived, before 
the plague, who caused it to be cleared for himself." Accordingly it 
was to this point that Miles Standish and his fellow explorers from 
Plymouth directed their course when, on the 29th of September, 
1 62 1, they made their first visit to the country of the Massachusetts 
{Memorial History of Boston, vol. i. p. 64). It was the central gath- 
ering place — at once the play-field and the muster-ground — of that 
"goodly, strong and well-proportioned people" whom the redoubt- 
able Captain John Smith described as being " very kind, but in 
their fury no less valiant.'' 



44 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

In the winter of 1891-92 this historical spot — the spot which 
was to the Massachusetts what the Isthmian Fields were to the 
Greeks — passed into the hands of a suburban land company. As 
one means of bringing it into notice, the promoters of the enterprise 
advertised for a name, offering a sum of money as a prize for that 
which should be selected as most euphonious and appropriate. 
From this ordeal the Massachusetts Fields emerged as " Norfolk 
Downs" ! It might, with far greater propriety and significance, have 
been designated Billings' Upland. 

But Norfolk Downs is merely the last historical misnomer. The 
next to the last was nearly, though not quite, as bad. In 1870 
Taylor's Hill in North Quincy passed into the hands of a land 
company, and, as usual, went in search of a name. It shortly re- 
appeared as Wollaston Heights ; by which designation it since has 
been, and hereafter doubtless will be, known. Dimblebee Heights 
would have been quite as appropriate (Braintree Records, p. 30). 

On the other hand, Taylor's Hill might well have been given a name 
of the greatest possible historical significance. As the investigations 
of Mr. Edwin W. Marsh, — that "valued friend" of mine "of the 
antique stock," to whom I have referred in the opening of this 
Address, — as Mr. Marsh's investigations have shown, Taylor's Hill 
and the whole surrounding region covered by the Wollaston Heights 
settlement, was a portion of the tract, including six hundred acres, 
allotted in 1636 by the town of Boston to William Hutchinson, the 
husband of that Mistress Anne Hutchinson whose name is burned 
deep into the early history of Massachusetts. It was to her hus- 
band's house on this grant that Anne Hutchinson came on her way 
to Rhode Island when banished from the colony of Massachusetts 
Bay in April, 163S. Wollaston Heights is therefore another mean- 
ingless misnomer ; the locality should have been called Hutchinson 
Heigrhts. The name would then have signified much. 



B. 



There is no branch of modern science the conclusions reached in 
which have undergone greater or more constant revisions than have 
those reached in geology. As matter of future, and at some remote 
day possibly of curious, reference, it may be worth while to state 
briefly the theory at this time most currently accepted of the latest 



APPENDIX. 45 

geological reconstruction of the territory now included in the limits 
of Quincy. 

Prior to the last glacial period the New England coast line is 
supposed to have run some fifty or sixty miles farther east and 
south than it now does, along what is known as the Continental 
Shelf. The territory which now constitutes Quincy was, therefore, 
at that time an inland locality, some two hundred feet higher above 
the sea-level than it now is. The INIerrimac River, instead of 
turning towards the north at Lowell, as at present, flowed in a south- 
easterly direction, finding its way to the ocean through the depres- 
sion which is now Boston Harbor. As respects the ocean, the site 
of Quincy, therefore, was somewhat as Springfield now is, — perhaps 
an equal distance from the sea-board and on a river of not much less 
niagnitude than the Connecticut. Like the neighboring region, the 
Blue Hills and Mount Ararat stood some two hundred feet higher 
than they now do, while the other Quincy hills (with the exception 
probably of Penn's Hill), Taylor's Hill, Forbes' Hill, President's 
Hill and Great Hill,— the drumlins, as they are called by geol- 
ogists, — did not exist. They are all of glacial formation. 

During the last glacial period there was probably from three 
to five thousand feet of solid ice over the highest summit of the 
Blue Hills. After the ice layers had attained a certain thickness a 
perceptible subsidence of the earth's surface followed. This process 
of subsidence went slowly and steadily on under the increasing pres- 
sure until the bulk of the ice disappeared. The subsidence then 
amounted to some two hundred feet, and the present shore-line 
of Quincy was accordingly submerged. After the disappearance 
of the bulk of the ice the crust of the earth rose again with, geo- 
logically speaking, considerable rapidity, some twenty feet above 
the present coast-line ; then, reacting, it reached what has since that 
time been the established level. The Quincy territory became sea- 
board, and the local geological outlines have not since undergone 
material change. 

During the glacial period, and especially after the ice began to 
melt and retreat, several sub-glacial rivers evidently discharged 
their waters through ice-tunnels tending in a southeasterly direc- 
tion across the northerly portion of Quincy. The line of the Blue 
Hills not impossibly served as a barrier of retardation in the retreat 
of the glaciers. One of these sub-glacial streams evidently dis- 
charged itself on the summit of what is now known as Forbes' Hill, 
as the ponds on the summit of that hill, and the 'deep erosive de- 

7 



46 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

pressions on each side of it clearly show. This and other streams 
flowing farther north, reached the sea through what is now known as 
Black's Creek, forming, as the ice disappeared, the kames and kettle- 
holes clearly to be distinguished in the Merry Mount Park and the 
low grounds north of Wollaston Heights. 

Through the forward flow of ice, during the glacial period, the soil 
overlying the granite and slate bed-rocks of Quincy was much 
eroded and borne away towards the southeast. In place of the soil 
thus removed a new glacial deposit was made on the lines now ex- 
isting, of which the Quincy drumlins, already referred to, are the 
distinguishing feature. One of the present theories of geologists, 
and a theory as plausible as any yet suggested, is that these drum- 
lins were accumulations in the bed of the ice movement of much the 
same character as those now seen wherever a body of water runs 
over a comparatively level bottom. In such cases, any obstacle 
which causes the current to move more slowly in one portion of the 
channel than in another, will lead to an accumulation of soil or ma- 
terial at the point of slackening. In this way, wherever, after the 
original surface-soil was removed by the ice-flow, there existed on 
the surface of the country a ledge or other unusual obstacle, such as 
an accumulation of boulders more easily surmounted than removed, 
the movement of the ice would be retarded and a mound of glacial 
deposit accumulated greater or less in proportion to circumstances. 
At the same time other portions of the surface, where less resistance 
was met, would be eroded to a corresponding degree. The exist- 
ence of the drumlins, and the corresponding depressions and water- 
courses, are in this way accounted for on a theory at least plausible ; 
though numerous other theories hardly less plausible are also ad- 
vanced, and can be found in the text-books (Wright, Ice Age of 
North America, chap. xi.). 

The remoteness of these changes in point of time is up to the 
present a subject of much question among geologists. Some main- 
tain that the glacial period was at least fifty thousand years ago ; 
while others argue that it was not more than eight or ten thou- 
sand. In the case of Quincy the superficial indications strongly 
favor the shorter period. The marks of glacial action in the shape 
of kames, ponds and drurnlins are so fresh that it is difficult to 
believe a period of even eight thousand years can have elapsed since 
the action which created these features of Quincy. The drumlins, 
for instance, are covered as a rule with a deposit of vegetable loam 
not over ten inches in depth. As is well understood by geologists, 



APPENDIX. 47 

the accumulation of loam goes on under some law the conditions of 
which do not yet admit of statement, and no inference as to age can 
safely be drawn from the presence or absence of that deposit ; but 
assuming that only eight thousand years have elapsed since the end 
of the glacial period, it would follow that the vegetable accumulation 
on the Quincy hills has not exceeded an inch and a half in a 
thousand years. As these drumlins were, until within the last two 
hundred years, covered with trees and undergrowth in the same way 
that the Blue Hills and other uncultivated upland portions of Quincy 
now are, it is not easy to see how the accumulations of vegetable 
deposit could have been so slow. Admitting the argument that this 
accumulation was prevented by the natural process of erosion, and 
especially by the heavy rains which must have marked the earlier 
period after the disappearance of the ice, it would follow that the 
drumlins ought to be cut deep by ravines, the channels of water- 
courses, and that a large accumulation of soil would be found in the 
adjacent valleys. Such is not the case. The drumlins bear no indi- 
cations of extensive erosion, or, indeed, of any erosion, except of a 
gradual and equal character ; neither is there any undue accumula- 
tion of soil in the valleys. On the other hand, such accumulation 
as has taken place, in swamps and elsewhere, is indicative of the 
passage of a brief geological period only. In fact, were not the 
indications at other points clear that the ice period occurred at least 
eight thousand years ago, the surface evidence in Quincy would lead 
lay or superficial observers to infer that hardly an eighth part of that 
time could have elapsed. 



c. 

Among the reasons for the incorporation of Quincy as an inde- 
pendent town, assigned in the petition of January, 1791, was the 
following : — 

"Your petitioners impressed with Common sentiments of their Country 
have a warm desire of seeing their Children educated in such a manner as 
is best adapted to render them the most useful members of Society and 
as they inhabit a long extent of Sea coast, their Character and habits of 
life will naturally take a maritime cast and an education adapted to fit 
them for trade navigation fishery and their attendant arts and manufac- 
tures would be very desirable, and as your petitioners humbly conceive 
would be greatly advanced under such an incorporation where those that 



48 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

advance their money for Schools might apply it to the best advantage 
and our youth be thereby rendered more extensively useful to their families 
and beneficial to the publick." 

Following the sea during the eighteenth century would next to 
agriculture seem to have been the favorite caUing of the young men 
of Braintree North Precinct. During the Revolution Mrs. Adams 
wrote : " The rage for privateering is as great here as anywhere. 
Vast numbers are employed in that way;" and in June, 1780, 
when the privateer Essex, from Salem, was captured in the Eng- 
lish Channel, twelve Braintree young men were in her crew. Most 
of them were from the North Precinct, and in proportion to popula- 
tion the loss was equivalent to that, possibly, of one hundred and 
fifty young men in 1890. 

The French Reign of Terror began with the decapitation of 
Louis XVI. in January, 1793, in consequence of which war was de- 
clared against France by Great Britain in the following February. 
At a special town-meeting, held in Quincy six months later, on 
August 12th, it was — 

" Voted, that Benja. Beale Esq, Hon. Richard Cranch esq and Moses 
Black esqr be a Committee to make a reply to a circular letter sent by 
the Merchants and traders of the town of Boston to the Select Men of this 
town. 

" Voted, that the above Committee be a standing Committee to see that 
there be not any privateers fitted out from this place by any of the Citizens 
of the United States or others against any of the Beligerent powers, in 
order that a strict neutrality may be kept between us and them." 



D. 

The petition for the incorporation of Quincy was presented to the 
General Court in January, 1791. As stated in the text, it was signed 
by one hundred and fifty persons, bearing fifty-nine different names. 
Of these one hundred and fifty persons, one hundred and twenty- 
nine were residents in the North Precinct of Braintree, five in those 
portions of Dorchester, south of the Neponset, known as " the 
Farms" and Squantum, nine in the adjacent easterly portion of 
Milton, and seven in that portion of the Middle Precinct of Brain- 
tree known as "Knight's Neck." In the following list of the sep- 
arate family names found appended to the petition of 1791, Pierce, 



APPENDIX. 



49 



Rowe and Rawson belonged to Milton, and the territory in which 
they lived was not made part of Quincy. Randall was of Knight's 
Neck, which was not annexed to Quincy until 1856, at which date 
no one named Randall lived there. Those names in the list printed 
in Roman are still borne by residents of Quincy, either descendants 
of, or from the same stock as, those who signed the petition ; those 
printed in Italics are either extinct in Quincy, or, if found there, 
are borne by persons not of the same family as those bearing 
the name who signed the petition. Making allowance for the 
three Milton names of Pierce, Rowe and Rawson, but including 
the Braintree name of Randall as resident in a locality subse- 
quently annexed to Quincy, it will be seen that twenty-eight out 
of fifty-six family names, or one half of the whole number, have 
within the century become extinct in Quincy, in persons of the 
same stock. Many of them would doubtless be found in other 
localities : — 



Adams. 


Burrill. 


Alleyne. 


Chandler. 


Apihrop. 


Chese/nan. 


Arnold. 


Clark. 


Beale. 


Cleverly. 


Badcock. 


Copcland. 


Bass. 


Cranch. 


Baxter. 


Crane. 


Belcher. 


Crosby. 


Bicknell. 


Curtis. 


Billings. 


Field. 


Black. 


Gay. 


Blanchard. 


Glover. 


Brackett. 


Hall. 


Brown. 


Hardwick. 



Hayden. 


Pray. 


Hobart. 


Quincy. 


Mollis. 


Randall. 


Norton. 


Rawson. 


Howard. 


Rowe. 


Hunt. 


Sanders. 


Marsh. 


Savil. 


Mead. 


Spear. 


Mears. 


Stetson. 


Miller. 


Tirrell. 


Newcomb. 


Turner. 


Nightingale. 


Veasey. 


Phipps. 


Webb. 


Pierce. 


White. 


Pratt. 





E. 



The Quincy city charter may not improbably hereafter prove an 
interesting document in the history of the gradual development of 
the American municipality of the future^ — that result to which the 
country is now slowly groping its way. A somewhat detailed state- 
ment of the course of events and line of discussion which led up to 



50 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

it will, therefore, not be out of place, and may hereafter become 
useful for reference. 

The change from town to city government began to be actively 
agitated in Quincy towards the close of the year 1884, and at a meet- 
ing of citizens of the Wollaston Heights district then held, a com- 
mittee was appointed to consider and report on the whole subject. 
Subsequently at an adjourned meeting on the 3d of January, 1885, 
Mr. Josiah Quincy, on behalf of the committee, presented an elabo- 
rate report, which was printed in full in the Quincy Patriot of 
the following Saturday (January loth). As the charter subsequently 
framed was in the main the work of Mr. Quincy, the following pass- 
age from this report is of interest as indicating the fundamental 
principles on which the instrument was based : — 

" The trouble with the usual form of city government is that it seems to 
be framed for the purpose of hopelessly mixing up executive and legisla- 
tive functions, and securing general irresponsibility and inefficiency; city 
offices are filled partly by election by the people, partly by election by the 
legislative body, partly by appointment by the mayor without confirmation, 
and partly by the mayor with confirmation by the legislative body; de- 
partments are headed by unpaid commissions of men having no special 
knowledge of the work which they have under their charge; a new mayor 
finds the offices filled with men over whom he has no control, and who hold 
their places independent of his will. The resuli of such a system is that 
very few men of proper executive ability are willing to take the office of 
mayor, for they know that they will be held responsible if things go 
wrong, without being given sufficient power to make them go right ; if the 
right man occasionally happens to be elected, the result is public disap- 
pointment at seeing how little he is able to accomplish, and the discourage- 
ment of future efforts at reform. Public indignation vents itself against 
the legislative body as a whole, without often being able to fix any respon- 
sibility upon any member or members of it. The legislative body usurps 
most of the executive functions, and the result is inefficiency and extrava- 
gance, if not actual corruption. A class of small common-council politi- 
cians is created who make their living by some hook or crook out of 
managing the affairs of the city. Such a condition of things, especially in 
the large cities, is only too famihar to all. Your committee beheves, 
however, that these evils can be avoided, as they have been already in 
some cities, by the adoption of a simple, business-Hke form of government. 
The principal point should be to give the mayor full executive powers, 
holding him to a strict responsibility to the people for the manner in 
which he exercises them, and to confine the legislative body strictly to its 
function, which has been well described as that of ' critics with the power 
of the purse.' Such an apparently simple and reasonable proposition 
involves, however, radical changes in the scheme of municipal government 
adopted by all of the cities of this State." 



APPENDIX. 51 

A mass meeting of citizens of the town, at which some six or 
seven hundred were present, was held in the Town Hall on the 8th 
of January, and the subject of a change of government discussed, 
the usual arguments for and against it being set forth by a number 
of speakers; and at an adjourned meeting, held on the 15th of the 
same month, a committee of thirty was appointed to take the whole 
subject into consideration. It was not until Monday, November 30th, 
that another public meeting was held. Meanwhile the committee 
had prepared majority and minority reports, the former in favor of 
and the latter adverse to a change of government, and both reports 
had been printed in the issue of the Quincy Patriot for Novem- 
ber 14th, 1885, where they can be found. 

At the meeting of November 30th a strong opposition to the pro- 
posed change developed itself under the lead of Mr. H. H. Faxon 
and Dr. William Everett j but at an adjourned meeting held a week 
later it was voted to appoint a committee of fifteen to frame a 
charter and submit it for consideration at a future meeting. Of this 
committee Mr. Theophilus King was chairman ; but the details of 
the work committed to it were put in the hands of a sub-committee 
consisting of Messrs. Josiah Quincy and Sigourney Butler. 

For over a year the matter remained under the careful advisement 
of these two gentlemen, both of whom were graduates of Harvard 
College, Mr. Quincy having been graduated in the class of 1880, 
and Mr. Butler in that of 1877 ; both also were lawyers, and felt a 
keen interest in the subject they had under investigation. Accord- 
ingly they not only made a careful study of municipal government 
in America, but put themselves in communication with every one 
within convenient reach, — including, among many others, Mr. 
Gamaliel Bradford of Boston, and Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn, 
N. Y., — who had made a special study of the subject, or had 
practical experience in it. 

The report of the committee, and a form of charter accompanying 
it, was submitted through the columns of the Patriot of January 29, 
1887. The following passage from this report is of interest as mat- 
ter of record, especially that portion of it which relates to the subject 
of minority representation. This possible feature in municipal 
government, referred to in the text as vital, was, it will be seen, 
fully considered in framing the charter, but omitted from it on the 
sole ground that the time for successfully introducing so novel a 
feature into a city charter had not yet come. It was dangerous to 
attempt everything at once : — 



52 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

" The charter has been drawn on the general lines recommended in the 
report of a former sub-committee of your body. The complete separation 
of the legislative and executive departments of city government, which 
was urged in that report as of the first importance, has been fully carried 
out in the present draft. As this involves something of a departure from 
the common form of city government, your committee venture to reca- 
pitulate some of the arguments formerl}' submitted. The extravagance, 
inefficiency, and corruption which unhappily are so often seen in city gov- 
ernments can hardly be claimed to exist because they are approved by 
a majority of the voters ; they exist, on the contrary, because the majority 
are unable, through defects in the scheme of government, to secure an 
honest and efficient administration of their affairs, and because a confused 
and vicious municipal organization paralyzes all effort to secure good 
government. The fundamental trouble in most city governments is their 
failure to make a proper distinction between the legislative and executive 
functions, and to keep them separate from each other. The necessity of 
such separation is conceded in theory as one of the cardinal principles of 
our republican government, but in practice it has been almost universally 
ignored so far as cities are concerned. All of the corporate powers are 
lodged in the mayor and the city council ; but in distributing these powers 
between them the charter commonly gives to the council not only all of the 
legislative, but an important part of the executive powers as well, and 
leaves it free to usurp still further executive powers, according to the com- 
mon tendency of legislative bodies. In defiance of the maxim, ' Delibera- 
tion is the work of many, Execution is the work of one,' the soundness of 
which is supported by all the past experience of the world, the attempt has 
been made to conduct municipal governments upon the theory that execu- 
tion as well as deliberation may properly be made the work of many. The 
natural result is inefficiency and extravagance, if not corruption. It is as 
contrary to sound principles to give a city council the power to choose 
executive officers, or to reject the mayor's appointment of such officers, 
or to administer a department of the city government through a committee 
of its members, as it would be to give a mayor the sole power to pass a 
municipal ordinance or to make an appropriation. The circumstances 
under which our government was founded naturally gave to those who 
shaped its first institutions an excessive dread of a strong executive, and 
led them to extend the legislative power at its expense. But the bitter 
and costly experience of municipal misgovernment ought by this time 
to have taught the lesson that there are greater dangers, at any rate so far 
as the government of cities is concerned, than any that can attend the 
granting of full executive powers to the mayor. To give such powers 
does not remove the government further from the people ; on the contrary, 
it brings it nearer to them, and renders it much more subject to their con- 
trol. Under a popular government experience has proved that one man 
can nearly always be held strictly responsible for the exercise of powers 
intrusted to him, but that a body of men is often irresponsible. A mayor 
is not likely to deliberately pursue a wrong course of action in defiance of 
public opinion; but when a council is once allowed to meddle with the 



APPENDIX. 53 

executive department and to have control of the expenditure of money or 
the making of appointments, defiance of public opinion on its part becomes 
a frequent occurrence, and when election day comes there is generally 
a complete failure to hold its members to any responsibility. Public 
opinion is nearly always irresistible when justly aroused and concentrated 
upon one man; but it is too apt to lose all of its force when it has to 
expend itself upon a body of men supporting one another in wrong-doing. 

" The mayor is just as much the servant of the people as is the humblest 
member of a common council, and from the nature of his position is far 
more subject to their control. The simpler the form of government is 
made, the more likely the people are to understand and control it. The 
responsibility of a mayor for executive work over which he is given full 
control is something that can be made clear to the dullest voter ; the 
responsibility of a councilman who has supported a job cannot often be so 
easily fixed and understood. Under a proper charter a city should be 
governed with some approach to the standard of efficiency attained by a 
large private corporation in the management of its business ; but such 
efficiency can only be reached by a system of government which secures 
the adoption of business principles. Spasmodic efforts to secure a busi- 
ness-like administration of city affairs through a citizen's movement at 
election time must be of temporary benefit at best if the system of city 
government is allowed to rest upon an utterly unbusiness-like basis. The 
separation in politics of local affairs from those of the state or nation is 
very rarely possible, but the municipal government can be placed upon 
such a basis that whether administered by the candidate of a citizens' con- 
vention, or of one of the regular political parties, it will be likely to be 
conducted upon business principles. 

" In view of the above considerations your committee in its draft of a 
charter has given the mayor absolute power of appointing and removing 
all of the municipal officers therein established, excepting only the mem- 
bers of the council, the members of the school committee, which consti- 
tutes a co-ordinate and independent branch of the executive department, 
and chooses its own superintendent of schools, and the auditor of accounts 
and comptroller, if any, the latter officers being chosen by the council to 
act as a check upon the executive department. All of these municipal 
officers are given the same absolute power to appoint and remove the 
subordinates in their respective departments. 

" To compensate for the large powers given to the mayor, your com- 
mittee has imposed upon him large responsibilities to the council and to 
the public. The mayor and his administrative officers are required to be 
present at all regular meetings of the council, and to give such information 
as may be asked for as to the business of their respective offices; they are 
given the right to speak upon all matters relating to their offices, but with- 
out the right to vote. They are also required to place upon public record 
the reasons for every removal from office made by them. The mayor may 
further be removed at any time by vote of two-thirds of all the members of 
the council; this provision will certainly be likely to act as a check upon 
any mayor who is inclined to abuse his powers, and as a sufficient safe- 



54 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

guard and means of remedy in case such abuse ever actually takes place. 
The term of office of the mayor has been left at one year, the customary 
term in the cities of this Commonwealth, although it has been lengthened 
in some large cities elsewhere to two years or more ; if a mayor is given 
proper powers there seems to be no great objection to requiring him to 
present himself to the people for re-election as often as once a year. 

"The only officers besides the mayor who are to be elected by the people 
according to the charter drafted are the members of the council and the 
members of the school committee ; your committee believes that all other 
officers properly constitute a part of the mayor's administration, and there- 
fore should be appointed by him. Members of the school committee are 
left to be elected, as at present, two members each year to serve for a 
period of three years. 

" Your committee has given much consideration to the subject of the 
city council. In accordance with the recommendation of the former report 
above referred to, a single branch only has been established, instead of two 
branches. The reasons urged in favor of two branches do not seem to be 
of much weight in the case of cities, while they tend to confusion and divi- 
sion of responsibility. The single legislative body, which it is proposed 
to call the council rather than the board of aldermen, is not an entirely 
new departure, as it was adopted in the recent charter in the city of Wal- 
tham in this State, and has also been in force in Brooklyn, where several 
years of experience have been in its favor, as well as in other large cities. 
In regard to the number of the council, there has been some difference of 
opinion in your committee, and a minority favors a larger number of mem- 
bers than twenty-three, — the number settled upon. 

"As to the manner of electing members of the council, your committee 
has followed the recommendation of the former report, and submits a plan 
for the election of eleven of the twenty-three members on a ticket at large, 
and of the remaining twelve by districts. 

"Much consideration has also been given by your committee to the 
question of adopting some form of minority representation, with the object 
of securing in the council a proportional representation of the opinions 
held by the voters ; by the present method of election a bare majority of 
the voters can elect all of the members of what should be a representative 
body, giving no representation at all to the minority party. The plan of 
cumulative voting, which is now in force in some elections in this country 
as well as in England, was fully considered, and rejected as not entirely 
satisfactory. While all the members of your committee admit the justice 
and desirability of minority representation, three of them do not consider it 
expedient to incorporate in the draft of the charter any plan for securing 
it, and it is therefore reported without one ; while three other members, 
believing that the system known as the single transferable vote is a scien- 
tific and satisfactory one, involving only difficulties in counting the ballots, 
which may well be undergone for the sake of the advantages to be gained, 
are in favor of incorporating in the charter a provision for such a system. 
In case the adoption of any more elaborate system of minority representa- 
tion is not favored, it is suggested that the adoption of what is known as* 



APPENDIX. 55 

the limited vote, — e. j^., allowing no one to vote for more than seven out of 
the eleven councilmen at large, — would secure, with great simplicity, a 
fairly just representation of the minority party." 

The eleventh section of the charter as proposed, being the second 
section of the title relating to the legislative department, read as 
follows : — 

"Section ii. Each qualified voter shall be entitled in all elections of 
councilmen at large to cast as many votes as there are councilmen at 
large to be elected, and in all elections of councilmen from wards to cast 
as many votes as there are councilmen to be elected from his ward. The 
persons receiving the highest number of votes shall be declared elected 
councilmen at large and councilmen from wards respectively." 

A series of public meetings were subsequently held, at which the 
provisions of the proposed charter were debated at length. At two 
of these, held on May 7th and 14th, the subject of minority repre- 
sentation was discussed in connection with the proposed section ii, 
and a strong and earnest effort was made by the more enlightened 
portion of those who took part in the discussion to have the principle 
of minority representation incorporated in the instrument. The 
chairman of the meeting, Mr. J. H. Slade, took the floor, making an 
earnest speech in advocacy of it; it was also advocated by Mr. 
Quincy. The principal arguments against it were those usually 
advanced against whatever is novel, in any way complicated, or but 
partially understood. The opposition manifested was sufficiently 
strong to show that the committee which prepared the charter was 
correct in its conclusion that the time had not yet come for a system 
of minority representation, in Quincy at least, and the issue was not 
pressed. 

As a result of these discussions the charter was referred back for 
amendment to the committee which reported it, and was subse- 
quently again reported in a new draft, through the columns of the 
Patriot in its issue of November 26, 1887. The alterations made 
in the original draft were not of a very material character ; but, so 
far as they went, especially in the direction of an increased ward 
representation in the council and a decrease in the number of those 
composing the council chosen at large, the changes distinctly failed 
to improve the original draft. They tended in the direction of the 
conventional city charter and in favor of the professional and ward 
politician. The human, less wise than the animal, sheep insisted as 
usual on being in the custody of the wolves. 



56 THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

A town-meeting was then called for Thursday, December ist, i8S8, 
at which, after an animated discussion, the form of charter recom- 
mended was approved, and a committee appointed to secure its 
passage by the Legislature. It became a law on the 17th of May 
following; was accepted by the town by a vote of 812 in favor, to 
454 against it, at a special town-meeting held on the nth of June; 
and it went into operation on the 5th of January, 1889. 



The Quincy charter has now been in operation for three years and 
a half. It may be said generally that as the result of its working 
the impression prevails that the composition of the council — the 
legislative department — is the weak point in it. In that body there 
has been a noticeable tendency towards the sacrifice of general to 
local interests. Ward politics and requirements have been unduly 
prominent. This it is claimed is due to the feature of local con- 
stituency in the charter, and to the want of any provision securing 
minority representation. The students of municipal government 
assert that the Quincy charter, as far as it went, was based on cor- 
rect principles ; but that it failed to carry out those principles to 
their necessary logical result. The analogy of the business corpora- 
tion should have been followed to its full extent, and all the members 
of the legislative department should have been chosen at large, re- 
gardless of ward lines ; with, moreover, some provision for minority 
representation. This result, it is argued, would have been brought 
about to manifest advantage had the charter provided for the election 
of a council to be composed of fifteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-four 
members, as might be thought best, all to be chosen at large, while 
no voter could vote for over two thirds of the entire number to be 
chosen ; but, on the other hand, each voter should have been at 
liberty to concentrate all, or any portion of the votes he could cast 
on one or more candidates, or to distribute them among the full 
number he was entitled to vote for, giving one vote to each. The 
fifteen, twenty-one or twenty-four candidates who received in this way 
the largest number of votes, irrespective of the size of the several 
votes as compared with the whole or each other, would be elected, 
and would compose the council. 

Had such a system of electing the members of the legislative 
department been made a part of the Quincy charter, it would, it is 
contended, have assured an almost absolutely free constituency 



APPENDIX. 57 

Had those composing this total constituency, or any portion of them, 
desired to secure ward or local representation, it would have been 
easy for them to organize themselves so as, through concentration of 
votes, to bring that result about. It was right that they should have 
this power. If, on the other hand, scattered citizens wished to form 
a constituency to bring about certain results, or choose to the council 
particular men, it ought to be made easy for them so to do. It is now 
difficult, if not impossible. Freedom for individual action was the 
object to be kept in view and the result to be secured ; and this 
result cannot be attained through the political systems now in use. 
It could be attained through changes in the basis of constituency 
of the kind suggested. 

As to matters of detail, and the innumerable possible complica- 
tions which the ingenuity of objectors always suggests, these, it is 
argued, could safely be left to the constituency and the party man- 
agers to work out. If left alone, they would do this as the difficulties 
arose, and in the easiest and most practical way. A great deal is now 
heard about trusting the people ; but those who most freely make use 
of this phrase are apt to show the least confidence in the ability of 
any body of voters to work an experimental system into practical 
shape by dealing with difficulties as they arise, and not before. It 
would probably not require the experience of three elections to 
familiarize both party managers and the great body of voters with 
the theory and practice both of minority representation and cumula- 
tive voting. The more intelligent and independent class of voters 
understand them already. 

The future will decide, probably as the result of slow and painful 
experience, whether the criticisms and arguments thus advanced are 
entitled to consideration. 

Meanwhile, it is in this connection worthy of notice that the last 
charter granted, that for the city of Everett, approved June ii, 1892, 
has provision, in one of the two bodies of which its legislative depart- 
ment is composed, for a certain degree of minority representation. 
It is there provided that the board of aldermen " shall be composed 
of six members, who shall be elected by and from the qualified voters 
of the city," to serve for a term of two years, three aldermen to be 
elected each year. ... In the election of aldermen " no voter shall 
vote for more than two of the candidates for the three positions 
respectively. If a voter marks more than two names for the three 
positions to be so filled, his ballot shall not be counted for any of 
such positions. ... In every municipal election . . . each voter 



So THE CENTENNIAL MILESTONE. 

may vote for a number of aldermen, one less than the number 
to be elected, and shall vote for no more ; and any ballot which 
is marked for a greater number of names than as above provided 
shall not be counted in the vote for aldermen." (Acts 1892, chap. 
355, sect. 10.) 

It will be observed that in this case, while no provision for cumu- 
lative voting is made, the candidates are at large, and a certain, 
though limited, provision for minority representation is secured. It 
is a step, although not a long step, in the direction of the larger 
change of constituency above suggested. 



F. 

The following extracts from a very interesting address on the 
" Government of Cities," and the " Need of a Divorce of Municipal 
Business from Politics," delivered by Mr. Moorfield Storey, at Buf- 
falo, N. Y., on September 30th, 189 1, and printed in the New Eng- 
land Alagazine for June, 1892 (New Series, vol. vi. pp. 432-441), have 
a manifest bearing on the text : — 

" Every city government is not as bad as that of New York, but every- 
where, with rare exceptions, inferior men are elected to municipal office, 
and any man, however little his education or his previous training may 
have fitted him for the work, is considered competent to deal with the 
complicated problems of municipal government. A succession of men 
more or less incompetent follow each other at brief intervals over the 
stage, and as a result there is no consistent economical administration of 
a city's business. Of Boston, a year ago, a gentleman who had been 
studying the operation of the various departments said, ' The methods are 
such that no business house could adopt them and keep out of bankruptcy 
six months.' 

" A third cause of our trouble may perhaps best be illustrated by a com- 
parison. A manufacturing corporation, whose stockholders include Re- 
publicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, and Mugwumps, desires a president. 
Those who are interested choose some man of acknowledged ability, and 
without asking what his political opinions are, say to him : ' Become our 
president, and we will pay you an adequate salary ; we will give you the 
assistance of the best directors that we can select from our own members ; 
you shall have power to manage our business as you think best, subject to 
their advice, and if you succeed you shall keep the place as long as you 
like.' The city seeking a mayor says to the same man : ' Do you wish to 



APPENDIX. 59 

become our mayor ? You must first agree to pay a large sum to the cam- 
paign fund for expenses. You must then satisfy the heads of certain 
factions that they and their followers have something to gain by your 
election ; and they are practical men, who are not to be satisfied with vague 
expressions of good will, and will want something very definite. You must 
then take the chances of a campaign in which all your sins and many 
which you have never committed will be marshalled against you in the daily 
papers, and you will be exposed to every kind of misrepresentation. If 
you are elected, we shall give you very small pay, and a board of directors 
who will be incompetent to help you, and entirely competent to embarrass 
and perplex you at every turn. You will receive plenty of criticism from 
every corrupt politician whose demands you either cannot or will not 
gratify, but little or no encouragement or support from good citizens, who 
are too busy with their own affairs or too modest to give you much atten- 
tion or assistance or even applause, and who treat your good works as a 
matter of course, while they are swift to visit on you, not only your own 
sins, but the shortcomings of every city official ; and when your term is 
over, and you are beginning to learn the duties of your office, we will remove 
you in order to put some other unfortunate victim in your place.' Is it 
surprising that the private corporation gets its president, and the city is 
obliged to look elsewhere for its mayor?" 



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